The US and South Korea have had a continuous back and forth fight over the status of US beef in Korea.  The Koreans are looking for anything to ban US beef in order to protect their own domestic beef industry at the expense of South Korean consumers who pay some of the world’s highest prices for beef products.

Earlier this month the fight over US beef continued when South Korea banned US beef again because in a massive shipment of US beef the inspectors found four boxes of beef that were produced for the US market not the Korean market because they contained bone fragments which are forbidden by the South Korean government.  The latest ban was enough that it got Congress moving on this beef fight with threats of bringing the issue up to the World Trade Organization.  These threats got the South Koreans to drop their ban, but for how long is anyone’s guess at this point.

However, what is interesting is that details are now beginning to emerge of how the four boxes found themselves inside the container with the rest of the US beef designated for export to South Korea.   Read the whole article but here is (pardon the pun) the meat of the article:

Four boxes of beef, weighing about 287 pounds, were mistakenly sent to South Korea as samples on June 2, although they were meant for domestic consumption, said Kim Do-soon, an official with South Korea’s Agriculture and Forestry Ministry.

The U.S. Agriculture Department informed Seoul of the latest mistaken shipment, Kim said.

Two U.S. meat plants, run by Tyson Foods Inc., processed the beef and have been suspended from handling meat bound for South Korea, the official said.

A spokesman for Springdale, Ark.-based Tyson, Gary Mickelson, said that, “contrary to South Korean news reports, Tyson Foods did not ship the beef in question.”

“We produced it for domestic sale and consumption,” he said Tuesday. “The product was sold by Tyson Foods to a Minnesota company, which resold the product to Iowa-based Midamar Corp.

“Midamar mistakenly exported the beef to South Korea several weeks ago without our knowledge, involvement or permission,” he said. “We’re once again working through USDA in hopes of quickly resolving this problem.”

Mickelson would not say which two plants were involved. The company has several facilities in Nebraska.

A spokesman for Midamar Corp. of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, said his company did not send the four boxes to South Korea.

Darrin O’Brien, who works in export sales for Midamar, said they were sent to a South Korean company in California, which he said he would not identify. He also said he didn’t know what that company had done with the samples.

Does anyone else find it interesting that the four boxes found in the US beef shipment to Korea were actually sent to a South Korean company in California and then magically some how appeared in the US container in South Korea?

Things that make you go hmmmm…….