Doubts creep in on Korean beef deal

The much-vaunted deal to open South Korea's borders to U.S. beef seems to be hanging by a thread.

Demonstrations and protests by Korean farmers and consumers against the deal are fed by internet and other media-inspired falsehoods about how U.S. people won't eat their own beef, how U.S. beef is a secret plot to kill Koreans and, of course, U.S. beef imports will drive South Korean farmers out of business.

U.S. beef organizations had doubts about the deal from the get-go. While always welcoming more foreign sales of U.S. beef, after all the stops and starts of the Korean beef trade, the new deal always did seem too good to be true. It still remains to see how much actual tonnage of U.S. beef is allowed into the country.

The Korean beef deal is the lynchpin of a much larger trade deal between the two countries, so Korean politicians are now running around the country, trying to tamp down opposition to the U.S. beef deal. How successful that effort will be remains to be seen.

Foreign trade is very tricky, at best, and the South Korean beef deal is starting out as a textbook example of that.