The Politics and Sub-Politics of Mad Cow Disease in South Korea

Abstract

In 2008, the South Korean government decided to resume importing beef from the United States, which had been stopped since 2003. The government’s attempt to reassure citizens with scientific claims met severe resistance, resulting in a whirlwind of political and technoscientific controversies over risks of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE). This article examines memories of protests in 2008 with two objectives; first, to discuss how sub-politics evolves when matters of concern become matters of fact and second, to better understand the aftermath of Korean BSE controversies. Thirty-eight semi-structured interviews with proponents and opponents of the BSE protests were conducted in 2019 and analyzed. Focusing on the complicated discursive struggles over science, society, and their relations, we demonstrated that, along with what people widely accept as the “facts” about US beef, a modern imaginary of science and politics as two separate spheres was reconstructed in Korea.

Keywords:

• Mad cow disease
• risk society
• sub-politics

Notes

1 A seminar held by the APH in May 2008 provides a site to observe anti-government experts’ knowledge claims. Four issues were addressed by APH. Above all, there was the safety problem. Woo Hee-jong, a professor of veterinary medicine, described BSE as “a dreadful disease with 100% fatality.” The second issue raised was about certain parts the administration decided to let into the Korean market. Park Sang- pyo, an activist and veterinarian, criticized the government’s definition of SRMs following the standard of OIE rather than that of the EU, which requires more parts of the intestines to be removed to secure food safety. Thirdly, APH regarded the government’s decision as what benefits the US livestock industry at the sacrifice of Korean citizens’ health. Finally, criticism was also raised about the agreed ban on importation inthe case ofBSE outbreaks in the US. While the Korean government maintained that the banwould work as a safety measure, Jeong Hae-kwan, professor of preventive medicine, disagreed: “If there is a potential problem that might threaten the safety of citizens, a normal thing for a government to do would be to withhold imports until it is scientifically proven that there is no problem.” The issues raised by antigovernment experts enabled many protesters to have conviction in their political actions.

2 Giddens also noted that in an advanced industrial society, people “cannot simply ‘accept’ the findings which scientists produce, if only because scientists so frequently disagree with one another” (Giddens 1999: 6).

3 Opponents’ narratives reveal a great deal of similarity with the Lee administration’s position in 2008, which accepted the OIE’s ruling of US beef posing no health risks as the solid science while regarding protesters to be manipulated by “nationalistic,” “political radicals,” or even “pro-North Korea leftists” trying to “exploit the issue” of BSE to mobilize mass political opposition movement against the pro- American government (Choe 2008; Jung 2013: 118). Elucidation of the human and institutional resources involved in circulating the administration’s narratives for a sustained period of time requires further investigation.

4 Even though we used the terms of “proponents” and “opponents” for analytical purposes, we witnessed cases which cannot be categorized into either of the two. Interviewee #8 was one of those people who made both positive and negative remarks on the 2008 protests.

5 As aforementioned, an interview is not an information gathering tool, but a site where performance events are produced through an exchange between the interviews and interviewers. This interviewee’s words and the sense of conviction in saying that s/he pursued “a good cause” through the protests had a particular presence that made the interviewers reflect on their own experiences of being indicted on the charge of riot in 2008 and having to witness how the public opinion of BSE risks changed rapidly during the Lee administration.

6 In a 2009 survey of teenagers who participated in the 2008 protests, 62.1% of respondents agreed that the protests were caused by “BSE concerns,” while 73.2% cited “the demand to secure Korean autonomy over food safety regulations.” The majority of the participants identified both health risks and concerns about the pro-American government as motives for their political action (Kim et al. 2010). However, as of 2019, ten years after the protests, we could see that comments on “irrational fear” of BSE caused by “misleading” information were made not only by the opponents but also by the proponents. Our findings suggest the possibility that what is recognized and uttered as “facts” about BSE by the Korean population in 2019 came to employ one “objective” standard as the OIE and the Lee administration would have wished in 2008, no longer allowing unexpected assemblages of issues and people to form around obscure objects. Verification of such a hypothesis needs a larger scale survey.

7 The moments of sciences were absent at least from our interviewees’ narratives revealing a gap between the moments of sciences extensively discussed by STS research on the 2008 protests and laypeople’s speech act in 2019 (Kim 2011, 2012). We do not aim to make a general claim that multiple natures and sciences are or are not to be recognized by laypeople; instead, we emphasize that in the contexts of rationalizing why they still advocate or criticize the 2008 protests, our interviewees in 2019 chose to close down, rather than open up the black box of Science.

8 Some of our interviewees mentioned that because the steadily declining number of vCJD cases after 2008 gradually came to verify the safety of imported beef, it is only reasonable to accept the scientific “fact” now in 2019 while uncertainties were to be taken more seriously back in 2008. Although such an interpretation seems commonsense, the social acceptance of US beef as a “safe” product cannot be so simply derived from the straightforward “fact” alone. For one thing, the number of vCJD cases had been declining worldwide not after but already before 2008 (Figure 2). If it is possible for someone, who had not regarded the decreasing number of vCJD cases before 2008 as the most salient fact in one’s risk assessment during the protests, to later stop problematizing the long incubation period for vCJD and accept the declining number ofvCJD cases as the “proof” for the safety ofUS beef, we can logically infer that his/her selection of criteria for judgment sometime after 2008 was not solely determined by material conditions - the changes in focus needed to be constructed out of one’s perceived circumstances.

9 We also did not make any points with regards to what broader contexts in Korean society have changed from 2008 to 2019 and how they might have shaped people’s narratives. This is another topic for discussion and will need further research with a focus on the waxing and waning of biopolitics, the historical relations between the Korean state’s power and people’s life itself.