Wednesday, June 25, 2008

Rural Route Radio

Hello all-

Well first I would like to thank Dr. Lawrence for giving a presentation for my at the Reciprocal Meat Conference in Florida, that I missed so I could come to Seoul. And in doing so another advocate for agriculture was there as a keynote speaker; Trent Loos, who is responsible for a radio program called Rural Route Radio (www.ruralrouteradio.com). Trent and other advocates in the industry do a segment daily about issues we face in agriculture. If you are interested in hearing Dr. Lawrence and Trent, go to that website and click on Tuesday. They discussed among many things - my thesis project; so if you are interested check it out.

The 13th Canadian case of BSE did not help things here. Now people are wondering why Canada has detected all these cases and the US has only found three - they think the US may not be testing enough. And even more absurd, that the US imports all of its beef from Australia ("clean and safe"), and that is all American people eat, and then we export all US beef - meaning we never eat beef grown in our own country. Give me a break.

An interesting little BSE fact: South Korea does test for it, but only healthy animals, never the downers. The age at which a domestic Hanwoo or Holstein is slaughtered is 34-36 months; which may be decreasing due to high feed prices. But the OIE, which is based in France and is responsible for determining (among other things) the BSE status of a country. South Korea has not done enough tests to be registered with the OIE as being 100% free of BSE. I asked what would happen if a positive case were to ever be found in Korea. The people would stop eating beef all together or import from Australia only (they haven't had a case of BSE yet). But I was also told that Korea would never have a case of BSE; why? Because they would never report it! Wow! So if you ask me this is a great example of see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. And yes the protests continue, the media slander continues, and the public policy deterioration continues.

Till next time.

5 comments:

Kellie said...

The radio show is pretty cool, you will have to let me know when you are going to be on there. Are you doing it from there, or when you get back. It is some interesting stuff. This is a good contact to have made.

Lindsay said...

I will be doing it from Seoul, Trent will call me and we will chat it up. He is the one that knows Lucy and Walstrum, from NE.

Anonymous said...

Wow, very interesting to actually hear what another country actually believes about the US Beef Industry. I would have never thought that the United States food supply would have been percieved in that manner. Keep up the good work!

Tony said...

Thanks for the informative blog as usual. The South Koreans really got a problem with US beef. Probably much more safer than UK Beef..lol.
I love you
Take care!

Jessica said...

I totally believe that. I believe that the only reason the countries who haven't "found" BSE haven't is because they don't test for it!