Redoubling beef sales efforts in South Korea

The U.S. Meat Export Federation (MEF) has its executives, including head man Phil Seng, in South Korea, to redouble U.S. efforts to sell beef there. It has been a rocky road, with U.S. beef banned for two years due to alleged BSE contamination.

This itself is a farce, because South Korean domestic beef has far more exposure to BSE than any in the U.S. There have been only two BSE cases in the U.S., both in dairy cows imported from Canada

After heavy pressure from the Bush Administration, the South Korean government has very reluctantly opened its borders to U.S. beef again, with very severe restrictions. Despite that, all the beef that's jumped through the hoops has been snapped up and there is strong demand for more.

U.S. vegetarians and animal rights radicals funded professional South Korean demonstrators--quite common in Asian countries--to march and picket against U.S. beef. The pressure on the government nearly banned U.S. beef again, but the Bush Administration stood firm and it is still there.

It is against this backdrop that Seng and MEF are in South Korea, campaigning for U.S. beef. It is an old bromide of sales that it is easier to sell more to your best customers than to develop new ones from scratch. Before the badly-overblown U.S. BSE scare, Korea and Japan were huge U.S. beef export markets.

We can only hope that MEF's efforts restore this luster.