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The 2008 US beef scare episode in South Korea: Analysis of an unusual public reaction
Abstract
We investigated major factors underlying an unusual 2008 public 'candlelight protest' in South Korea about US beef imports related to concerns about bovine spongiform encephalopathy. Using a survey we explored determinants of consumer responses to negative publicity in mass media. Respondents (80.7 per cent) reduced consumption of imported beef during the scare; of those 62.5 per cent decreased consumption of US beef only. We explain the determinants in order of their importance and define the relevant terms from a theory of consumer behavior in economics. Our findings suggest that several effects worked jointly in their influence on most respondents who reduced beef consumption.Journal of Public Health Policy advance online publication, 28 August 2014; doi:10.1057/jphp.2014.33.
Bringing together a multidisciplinary conversation about the entanglement of nature and society in the Korean peninsula, Forces of Nature aims to define and develop the field of the Korean environmental humanities. At its core, the volume works to foreground non-human agents that have long been marginalized in Korean studies, placing flora, fauna, mineral deposits, and climatic conditions that have hitherto been confined to footnotes front and center. In the process, the authors blaze new trails through Korea's social and physical landscapes.
What emerges is a deeper appreciation of the environmental conflicts that have animated life in Korea. The authors show how natural processes have continually shaped the course of events on the peninsula—how floods, droughts, famines, fires, and pests have inexorably impinged on human affairs—and how different forces have been mobilized by the state to variously, control, extract, modernize, and showcase the Korean landscape. Forces of Nature suggestively reveals Korea's physical landscape to be not so much a passive context to Korea's history, but an active agent in its transformation and reinvention across centuries.
This chapter examines how the bifurcated agricultural policy pursued from the 1980s enabled the expansion of livestock production in Korea without significant changes to the agricultural landscape in South Korea. Critically, the bifurcation policy protected domestic markets for meat while allowing the expansion of livestock production through imported feed. Whereas the state was willing to liberalize the agricultural sector in order to maintain access to major export markets for industrial goods, the agricultural sector, through political mobilization across subsectors, was able to gain considerable concessions that limited the import of products strategically important to the domestic agricultural sector—most notably rice and meat products. The bifurcation policy essentially became a political compromise that allowed the domestic livestock sector to expand and consolidate itself during the 1980s and 1990s. Such a compromise also enabled agricultural policy to maintain rice production as the dominant crop by contracting out feed-grain production to overseas territories. Traveling through a Korean agricultural landscape of rice fields intermixed with orchards and horticulture is thus possible because South Korea’s livestock sector relies on millions of hectares of industrial scale monoculture overseas. Only by acknowledging the soybean fields of Argentina and Brazil, the cornfields of the US Midwest, or the former tropical forest areas of Cambodia can one truly comprehend how the meatification of South Korean agriculture has altered land use and agricultural landscapes. The massive forest fires that ripped across much of the Amazon basin in the summer of 2019 testify to how the maintenance of a paddy rice landscape in South Korea has destructive effects that ripple well beyond the peninsula.
The South Korean government's reversal of a ban on American beef imports in 2008 caused enormous political and social upheaval in the country. The government's acquiescence to the United States' request to resume imports of boned beef and beef from cattle slaughtered over the age of 30 months led to overwhelming negative publicity, as mass media described the decision as yielding to U.S. pressure at the expense of public health. Koreans gathered to demonstrate against the agreement; the resulting “candlelight protest” quickly intensified, spreading across the country from May 2008 through August 2008. Given the different opinions regarding the main causes of the event, this study revisits the issue by empirically testing for switches in meat demand for different types of meat among South Korean consumers. The results indicate that there was no structural change in meat demand around the candlelight protest period, which suggests that variations in meat demand during that period can be explained by changes in relative prices between different types of meat. This implies that unlike the findings of previous studies, the negative consumer reaction was not associated with risk‐averse behavior concerning the consumption of U.S. beef.
[EconLit citations: C14; E20; Q11]
In the 2000s, China has witnessed a series of consumer boycott campaigns, some of which received nationwide publicity, and one of which, the campaign against the French discounter chain Carrefour in 2008, produced street pickets. The motivation behind these campaigns has been largely nationalistic, as the brands or companies targeted were deemed to offend China. This article sketches the dynamics of consumer boycotts and asks whether, beyond being a vehicle of nationalism, the emerging politics of consumption is also becoming a tool of expressing taste.
Although boycotts are increasingly relevant for management decision making, there has been little research of an individual consumer's motivation to boycott. Drawing on the helping behavior and boycott literature, the authors take a cost-benefit approach to the decision to boycott and present a conceptualization of motivations for boycott participation. The authors tested their framework during an actual boycott of a multinational firm that was prompted by factory closings. Consumers who viewed the closures as egregious were more likely to boycott the firm, though only a minority did so. Four factors are found to predict boycott participation: the desire to make a difference, the scope for self-enhancement, counterarguments that inhibit boycotting, and the cost to the boycotter of constrained consumption. Furthermore, self-enhancement and constrained consumption are significant moderators of the relationship between the perceived egregiousness of the firm's actions and boycott participation. The authors also explore the role of perceptions of others' participation and discuss implications for marketers, nongovernmental organizations, policymakers, and researchers.
This research addresses the question of how boycotting (punishing business for unfavorable behavior) differs from buycotting (rewarding business for favorable behavior). This analysis of 21 535 adults from the 2002/2003 European Social Survey (ESS) compares the effects of social capital, altruism, and gender on different categories of political consumers. Logistic regression analyses reveal that boycotters do indeed differ from buycotters. Specifically, women and people who are more trusting, involved in more voluntary associations, or more altruistic are more likely to buycott than boycott. These differences support the inclusion of both boycott and buycott measures in future studies of political consumerism.
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This paper examines how South Korean households responded to an unprecedented boycott campaign against US beef from spring to summer of 2008, and investigates differential responses in relation to households' characteristics. It was found that beef consumption reduced by 4.8% immediately after the so-called candle-light demonstration. Instead, pork and chicken consumption increased by 17.2% and 16.6%, respectively. This confirms a substitution effect due to the negative publicity concerning US beef. It was also found that the negative publicity effect was transitory and the reactions of consumers were not uniform; they differed depending on their socio-economic characteristics. The econometric model revealed that younger, less-educated, and/or lower-income households were more susceptible to the negative publicity, and reduced their beef consumption more than other households.
This study provides an assessment of the perceived relative risk of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) in the context of other aspects of livestock production and human health issues. The factors influencing consumers' concerns regarding these issues are identified. Consumers' risk perceptions and risk attitudes about beef and poultry and the factors that influenced any reduction in beef consumption due to food safety issues or BSE are analyzed. General population internet-based survey were used to collect data in Japan (2009) and Canada (2006, 2009). BSE remains the highest ranking livestock production concern in Japan, in 2009, 9 years after the first animal with BSE was found in Japan. In Canada (2009), 6 years after the first domestic animal was found to have BSE, BSE ranked 7 out of 8 in possible livestock production concerns. Respondents in both countries who are older and female have a higher probability of being concerned about all livestock production issues. Higher levels of education in Canada are associated with a lower probability of ranking BSE as a high risk issue, while in Japan the opposite occurs. Canadian respondents have higher risk perceptions about poultry than beef and are more willing to accept the risks of eating beef than poultry (higher risk attitudes) than Japanese respondents. Together with some of the demographic variables, risk attitudes and risk perceptions have significantly influenced reductions in beef consumption due to food safety issues over the past 4 years and since consumers first heard about BSE.
Empirical examinations of the "social amplification of risk" framework are rare, partly because of the difficulties in predicting when conditions likely to result in amplification effects will occur. This means that it is difficult to examine changes in risk perception that are contemporaneous with increases and/or decreases in social or media discussion of the risks associated with a particular risk event. However, the collection of attitude data before, during, and after the increased reporting of the risks of genetically modified food in the United Kingdom (spring 1999) has demonstrated that people's risk perceptions do increase and decrease in line with what might be expected upon examination of the amplification and attenuation mechanisms integral to the framework. Perceptions of benefit, however, appeared to be permanently depressed by negative reporting about genetically modified food. Trust in regulatory institutions with responsibility for protecting the public was not affected. It was concluded that the social amplification of risk framework is a useful framework for beginning to explain the potential impact on risk perceptions of a risk event, particularly if that risk event is presented to the public as a new hazard occurring in a crisis context.
Risks appear to be perceived in two different ways, affectively and rationally. Finnish adult internet users were contacted via e-mail and asked to fill an internet questionnaire consisting of questions of food risks and measures of avoidance and approach motivation, analytic and intuitive information processing style, trait anxiety, and gender in order to find out (1) whether food risks are perceived two-dimensionally, (2) how individual differences in motivation, information processing, and anxiety are associated with the different dimensions of food risk perceptions, and (3) whether gender moderates these associations. The data were analyzed by factor, correlation and regression analyses. Three factors emerged: risk scariness, risk likelihood, and risks of cardiovascular disease. Personality and gender x personality interactions predicted food risk perceptions. Results showed that food risk perceptions generally form two dimensions; scariness and likelihood, but that this may depend on the nature of the risk. In addition, results imply that individuals with high avoidance motivation perceive food risks as scarier and more likely than others, and that individuals with an analytic information processing style perceive food risks as less likely than others. Trait anxiety seems to be associated with higher food risk perceptions only among men.
This article presents a comparative study of public perceptions of food risk across 25 European member states. A secondary data analysis is conducted on a Eurobarometer survey fielded to nationally representative samples in 2005. The survey included closed questions as well as free associations to map risk perceptions. Taking a quantitative approach, we find that people in a majority of European countries express similar levels of concern about food risks. However, outside this majority a North-South divide is evident, with the Northern countries worrying less than the Southern countries. Multilevel modeling shows that cross-national differences in individual respondents' level of worry are in part attributable to shared country effects and to generalized risk sensitivity about a range of personal risks. On the underlying structure of food risk concerns, factor analysis points to three dimensions described by groupings of risks related to adulteration and contamination, health effects, and production and hygiene. A qualitative analysis of respondents' free associations about problems and risks with food identifies three major themes that are consistent with the quantitative results. However, the free associations also point toward greater cross-national diversity and to striking variations in the range and importance of food risks. Overall, the picture is of a public that frames food risks in a wider context of beliefs about the links between diet and health. We conclude with some implications for research on food risk perceptions in particular and risk perception studies in general.
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