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U.S.-Korean food fight.

Article Excerpt
Whether measured in terms of farmers markets, growing memberships in the Slow Food movement, or supermarkets like Wal-Mart selling locally grown produce, the eat-local phenomenon is exploding across the United States. Americans are increasingly concerned with what they put in their bodies and where their food comes from. They can point to good reasons: the obesity epidemic, food contamination, mad cow disease and avian influenza, the survival of small farmers, oil shortages and the massive amounts of energy used to ship food around the planet.

But as this healthy trend spreads across America's heartland, the U.S. government is working to deny South Koreans the right to local food and to undermine their domestic food safety laws through the Korea-U.S. Free Trade Agreement (FTA). On June 30, 2007, one day before President Bush's "fast-track authority" expired, U.S. and South Korean negotiators signed the FTA. It now awaits ratification by Congress through an up-or down vote without amendment. So far, the Democratic leadership has said that the FTA is "dead in the water," but on the unenlightened grounds that the FTA did not go far enough in prying open South Korea's auto and beef markets.

If enacted, the FTA will become the most economically significant trade deal since the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Financial transactions between the two countries surpass $74 billion annually. The United States also intends to use it as a model to expand trade liberalization throughout Asia. Like NAFTA, the FTA will forever change Korea's agricultural economy.

The Fate of Korean Farms

"In 1990, South Korea had 10 million farmers. Today, there are 3.5 million," said Sin Moon Hee of the Korean Women Peasants' Alliance. "This is what unfettered trade has done to us and to the Korean countryside."

In 2006, the United States exported $3.4 billion worth of agricultural, fish,...

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