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South Korea to delay resumption of US beef imports By KWANG-TAE KIM, Associated Press Writer
1 hour, 4 minutes ago
The South Korean government said Monday it was delaying its planned resumption of U.S. beef imports after tens of thousands of people took to the streets in protest over the weekend.
Agriculture Ministry spokesman Kim Hyun-soo said the ministry, after a request from the ruling party, had decided to put off the final administrative step for imports to resume. He offered no further details, including how long the delay would last.
U.S beef has been banned by South Korea for most of the past four and a half years over fears of mad cow disease. In April, South Korea agreed to reopen what was the third-largest overseas market for American beef before the first case of the disease was found in Washington state in 2003.
The ministry had earlier requested that new quarantine rules, announced last week, be officially published Tuesday in a government journal, which would clear the way for inspections of U.S. beef shipments to commence.
Nearly 60,000 people took to the streets of Seoul over the weekend to denounce the government and call for the import agreement to be scrapped. Police clashed with protesters and detained about 300, though some were released.
Protesters claim U.S. beef is unsafe and say President Lee Myung-bak is ignoring their concerns, behaving arrogantly and kowtowing to Washington. The government has repeatedly said American beef poses no safety risk.
Lee's Grand National Party on Monday requested that the Agriculture Ministry delay the step, according to party spokeswoman Cho Yoon-sun.
Though Lee's margin of victory in December's election was the largest ever in South Korea, his handling of the beef issue has seen his popularity plummet. He took office on Feb. 25.
Scientists believe mad cow disease, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy, spreads when farmers feed cattle recycled meat and bones from infected animals. The U.S. banned recycled feeds in 1997.
In humans, eating meat products contaminated with the cattle disease is linked to variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, a rare and fatal malady.