September 26, 2007
Politics, misplaced policies beleaguer US beef talks with South Korea, Japan
Political tensions on South Korea and Japan has hampered discussions of full reopening of beef trade with the United States, an official from the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) said.
Chuck Lambert, USDA's deputy undersecretary for marketing and regulatory programs laments distractions are made on crucial moments that the agreement is supposed to be sealed.
He also pointed out that the political climate in the run-up to South Korean elections has been punctuated with politicians calling for import limits and demonstrations by domestic cattlemen seeking to ban US beef imports.
Nevertheless, Lambert is optimistic South Korean officials will reach the sixth step of their eight-step evaluation process sometime in October. Step six involves re-discussion and renegotiation of Seoul's import protocols. Step seven consists of a 21-day comment period, and step eight signals the start of trade under the new protocols.
Lambert said he is confident that US measures put in place to tighten box-weight tolerances on beef exports will reduce the frequency of faulty shipments to Seoul. He noted that shipments recently rejected for containing banned bones were in the pipeline before the new weight tolerance rules went into effect.
Resigning agricultural ministers in Japan also helped slow the talk process. The other obstacle is the Japanese accustomed taste to Australian grainfed beef when the US vacated the Japanese market in 2003 over
Lambert said these factors can all be true and that only time and market conditions can tell how much permanent shift there has been.
Japan bought about 25,000 tonnes of US beef from January to July this year, compared with about 14,000 tonnes during all of 2006. While improving, there is still a long way to go to reach the roughly 375,000 tonnes imported in 2003.
While waiting for a progress, USDA is setting its sights on smaller Asian markets. Taiwan yearly imports US$100 million worth of US skeletal beef under 30 months of age.
Hong Kong, Thailand, Singapore, Indonesia, Macao, the Philippines and Vietnam also belong to the market list.
Lambert said adding up the US$5 million to US$10 million market range is already good.
