Message to South Korea: just do it

The overarching, commanding principle in all dealing with Asians one-on-one is to save face.

Any unpleasantness, difficulty or disagreement is put off and glossed over in personal encounters. So it is with the negotiations with South Korea for a new multi-lateral trade pact with the U.S. Korea needs such a pact much worse than the U.S. does, as its a land-poor, crowded country with practical limits on agricultural production, manufacturing capacity and raw materials to make into goods.

Consequently, South Korea needs to ship what products it does produce to the U.S. market for cash, and buy lots of ag products and raw materials that it can't produce itself. Fortunately the Bush Administration, probably because President Bush considers himself a rancher, has made the complete re-opening of beef trade the lynchpin of any such trade agreement. Just today South Korea expressed the hope that beef trade would resume soon, as if somebody other than they themselves, were responsible for that decision.

So far it's been a farce. South Korea has repeatedly declared the border open for U.S. beef, only for a shipment of U.S. beef to arrive on their shore and be rejected by government inspectors for a very miniscule finding of a bone fragment in one box out of a whole ship load. This is not a health issue--U.S. beef has way fewer BSE questions than Korea's locally produced beef--it is a protectionism issue, to keep beef prices high for Korea farmers.

So as trade negotiations resumed today between high level U.S. and Korean trade representatives, this empty expression of hope for beef trade means nothing. The time has passed for face-saving platitudes. It's time for action. It's been three long years since Korea cut off U.S. beef trade due to BSE, and there no longer is a defensible reason for not opeing the beef trade.

The windy platitudes and feeble excuses of Korean officials have worn very thin, and must be replaced by concrete action.