코스타리카 (Costa Rica)는 중남미 국가로, 인구 410만 명, 일인당 GNP 약 2,000$로 우리나라의 1/10 수준이다. 코스타리카는 미국과 최근, 올해 5월 6일 쇠고기 수입조건을 확정했다. 수출증명 프로그램 (VE)으로 이 내용은 미국 농무성의 홈페이지에 공개되어 있다.
먼저 내용을 살펴보자. 앞부분은 코스타리카 수출에 필요한 일반 사항이 서술되어 있는 바 생략하고, 미국이 코스타리카에 쇠고기 수출을 위해서 반드시 갖추어야 할 증명요구 부분을 번역해본다.
A. 증명요구사항 (Certification Requirements)
1. 소의 뼈 없는 살코기, 혀, 신장, 간과 심장; 수출신청을 위한 FSIS 양식 9060-6을 작성, 코스타리카 수출증명조건에 충족시켜야 한다. (중간 생략). 아래의 내용은 증명서 (letterhead certificate) 에 반드시 기록되어야 한다.
a. 뼈 없는 살코기, 혀, 신장, 간 또는 심장은 반드시 30개월 미만이어야 한다.
b. 반추동물 유래의 뼈와 고기로부터 만들어진 사료를 먹이지 않는 동물로부터 생산된 고기. 반추동물 유래의 동물 단백질 사료를 반추동물에 먹이는 것인 미국에서 금지되어 있다.
c. 뼈 없는 살코기, 혀, 신장, 간 또는 심장은 편도선을 포함하지 않는다. 고기, 혀, 신장, 간 또는 심장은 광우병 (BSE)과 관련된 다음의 어떤 특별위험물질 (SRM)도 포함하지 않는다; 두개골, 뇌, 눈, 편도선, 삼차신경절, 등뼈, 척수, 배후신경절, 그리고 내장 (십이지장에서 직장까지)
d. 고기, 혀, 신장, 간 또는 심장은 '미국 국립 잔류 프로그램 샘플링 계획 (USA National Residue Programs sampling plans)' 에 의한 화학시험에 통과되어야 한다.
e. 제품 (고기, 혀, 신장, 간 또는 심장)은 사람의 소비에 적합하도록 검사되고, 통과되어야 한다.
f. 제품 (고기, 혀, 신장, 간 또는 심장)은 살모넬라와 대장균 검사를 포함한 강제적 규정인 HACCP 기준에 의해 생산해야 하고 이를 완벽히 준수해야 한다. (이하 생략)
위 내용을 요약해 보자. 미국에서 코스타리카에 쇠고기를 수출하기 위해서는 미국정부가 보증하는 수출증명 규정을 충족시켜야 하는바, 수출대상품목은 30개월 미만의 뼈 없는 살코기, 혀, 신장, 간 또는 심장만으로 제한했다.
그리고 위험물질에 내장 전체를 포함시켜서 코스타리카에 수출되는 것을 원천 금지시켰다. 또한, 미국의 수출업자들이 샘플링 화학실험을 하게끔 규정하였다. 이뿐 아니라 HACCP 즉, 식품위해요소 중점관리기준을 적용시켜 살모넬라와 대장균의 검사까지 하게끔 했다. 모두 미국 부담이다.
코스타리카는 중남미의 소국이다. 국력을 단순 비교할 수 없지만 인구와 일인당 GNP를 기준으로 한다면 우리나라의 1/10 수준이다. 그런데 코스타리카는 내장의 처음부터 끝까지 모두를 위험물질에 포함시켰고 또한 이명박 정부가 얻어오지 못한 수출증명 EV 조건도 확보했다.
미국과 코스타리카가 체결한 날짜도 먼 과거가 아니다. 불과 한 달하고 보름 전이다. 이명박 정부와 미국이 새로운 협정문에 서명한 직후다. 지난 4월 18일, 대한민국의 이명박 정부가, 30개월 이상은 물론 검역주권이 상실된 사상 최악의 엉터리 협정문에 서명을 한 직후에, 미국은 중남미의 소국인 코스타리카와 우리보다 훨씬 엄격하게 쇠고기 수출조건을 맺은 것이다.
▲ 21일 오후 세종로 정부중앙청사 별관 브리핑실에서 김종훈 통상교섭본부장(왼쪽)과 정운천 농림수산식품부 장관이 한미 쇠고기 추가협상 결과와 후속 대책에 대해 발표하고 있다. ⓒ 오마이뉴스
그 후, 5월 초부터 대한민국의 온 국민은 광우병 위험으로부터의 생존권과 주권회복을 위해 촛불시위에 자발적으로 참여했고 수십만의 비폭력 평화시위를 이어가면서 미국은 물론 전 세계의 주목을 받고 있다. 그럼에도 불구하고 이명박 정부는 여전히 꼼수와 무능력의 표본을 보이며 추가협상이라고 얻어온 것은 실효성 없고 빈 껍데기의 품질표준관리 (QSA) 뿐이다. 그리고 관보게시를 강행하겠다고 한다.
긴말 하지 않지 않겠다. 이명박 정부가 5천 년 역사를 이어온 대한민국의 정부이라면, 최소한 중남미의 소국, 코스타리카의 수준이라도 맞춰라. 그럴 자신이 없으면 당장 내려와라.
작성자분께.. 정확한 출처를 좀 정확히 알 수 있을까요.
자주가는 카페에 글을 나르긴 했는데.. 정확성이 있으면 좋을꺼 같아서요..
일산사람님 글이야 저는 믿지만 ^^.. 부탁드리겠습니다.
전에 봤던 글 같기도 하고(주부치매입니다.^^).. 어쨌든 대문으로 보내주시고...
대한민국이 초라해지고 한심해지는 것은?
대한민국의 정체성의 근간인 홍익인간, 광명이세 정신이 제대로 작동하지 못하기 때문이죠. 우리의 정체성이 제대로 작동되면 그 기반 위에 신명풀이가 방편으로 작동해 버리면 아픈 일도 담담해지고 어려운 일도 화이부동해서 공동체의 가치와 이익을 공고하게 하는데, 이명박 정권은 그렇지 못하지요. 일단 개념이 없어서고 가진자를 위한다는 프레임과 한계상황 때문이겠지요.
이 글은 국제외교에 대해 상당한 안목을 가진 연구원이 쓴 글인거 같은데, FTA와 소고기협상의 연관관계에 대해서 어느 정도 설득력 있게 설명해 주고 있는 글이라고 봅니다. 참고로 코스타리카는 현재 미국과 중미자유무역협정 (CAFTA)를 추진중에 있습니다.
Food Safety on the Butcher's Block
Christine Ahn and GRAIN | April 18, 2008
Editor: John Feffer
Foreign Policy In Focus www.fpif.org
On April 11, the Center for Disease Control (CDC) released a report that found that of the national efforts to improve U.S. food safety, “none of the targets were reached in 2007.” According to the CDC, 76 million Americans – one in four – come down with food poisoning every year. Among the most common is E. coli, a byproduct of the system of industrialized animal agribusiness. Americans have a common perception that the problem stems from food coming from outside the country – from China, say, or Mexico. Instead, it's our food that's the problem.
Instead of cleaning up its own act, the American meat industry has shifted responsibility to the consumer – not just in the United States, but also in countries where U.S. meat is exported. The United States is using bilateral trade agreements to arm-twist weaker countries into accepting its food safety standards as a tool to expand the market control of U.S. corporations. South Korea is the latest victim.
In June 2007, the United States and South Korea signed a free trade agreement (FTA) that now awaits ratification in the ROK National Assembly and the U.S. Congress. A pre-condition for negotiations was a commitment from South Korea to lift its ban on U.S. beef, which had gone into effect in 2003 after the discovery of a U.S. calf with mad-cow disease. In order to get the FTA talks rolling, South Korea’s former president Roh Moo Hyun partially lifted the ban, allowing boneless beef and meat from cattle aged under 30 months to reach Korean markets. However, subsequent shipments of U.S. beef have been quarantined and returned for containing bone fragments, including a beef shipment last July that contained an entire spine.
These discoveries in South Korea – coupled with more recent episodes such as a rat found last month in frozen vegetables imported into Korea from the United States and the release of a video showing abuse of downer cows at a Westland/Hallmark Meat Company slaughtering house that resulted in the largest recall of beef in U.S. history – have reinforced concerns within the Korean public. This would normally spell trouble for the pro-FTA lobby since Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Montana) has said that he wouldn’t even entertain the FTA unless South Korea lifts its ban on U.S. beef. However, the U.S. meat industry, and its allies in the Bush administration, is lobbying Korea with all its might to lift the ban before week's end.
“There is a lot of pent-up interest in the market,” said Assistant U.S. Trade Representative Wendy Cutler of these U.S. beef corporations. Although the new conservative president, Lee Myung-bak, visits Washington this week to affirm South Korea’s commitment to the FTA and the U.S.-ROK military alliance, he may not have enough votes in the National Assembly to dismantle Korea’s domestic health laws to accommodate U.S. corporate interests.
Beef in Context
The U.S. beef industry's battle against Korean consumers is part of a larger corporate food safety agenda advanced increasingly through bilateral channels. The strategy is codified in terms like "science-based," "equivalence," and "harmonization". Powerful countries are using bilateral agreements to compel weaker countries into accepting their food safety standards and expand the market control of their own corporations.
With Korea, the United States has been insisting that no free trade deal is possible unless Korea changes its food safety import regulations for beef, recognizes U.S. beef inspections as equivalent, and opens its market to cheap U.S. beef imports. Most Koreans are dead set against these U.S. demands: a recent poll found that 87% of Korean housewives believe American meat is “unsafe.” Koreans not only want to protect their local farmers, who will, with the implementation of the FTA, face competition from tariff-free subsidized U.S. beef imports. They are also justifiably concerned about the safety of U.S. meat, especially when it comes to BSE or Mad Cow Disease.
Korea, like many other countries, enacted a complete ban on U.S. beef when a case of BSE was detected in the United States in 2003. Ever since, the United States has pushed hard to regain valuable beef export markets in Korea and elsewhere through a twin process of defining its own BSE inspection system and getting the rest of the world to accept this system as safe. Not being able to convince authorities in key markets like Japan and Korea about the merits of its BSE control efforts, the United States has looked for leverage elsewhere, mainly with the World Animal Health Organization (OIE), the international standard setting body for animal health recognized by the WTO.
The U.S. strategy at the OIE has been to change the guidelines covering trade from countries with BSE so that a country's status is based not on the presence of BSE but on a "scientific risk assessment" of the safeguards that a country adopts to keep BSE out of exports. The United States moved this process along in 2003 by creating a new status of "minimal risk" for countries exporting to the United States. It then successfully pushed for a resolution at the OIE in 2005, which was adopted in 2006, where the five original categories for classifying a country were reduced to three and modified into the new categories of "negligible BSE risk," "controlled BSE risk," and "undetermined BSE risk." Moreover, where the OIE previously only ruled on a country's claim to be BSE-free, now the OIE could rule on whether a country should be considered a "controlled risk", greatly facilitating that country's ability to export. At its May 2007 General Session in Paris, with Korean protestors outside in the streets, the OIE issued its first list of "controlled risk" counties, with the United States not surprisingly making the cut.
The United States immediately used this ruling from the OIE to push hard for the opening of markets to U.S. beef. "We will use this international validation to urge our trading partners to reopen export markets to the full spectrum of U.S. cattle and beef products," said Mike Johanns, U.S. secretary of agriculture. "We will use every means available to us to ensure that countries rapidly take steps to align their requirements with international standards."
Although the OIE ruling in no way forced it to change its regulations, Korea faced the added pressure of the FTA negotiations. It ultimately reopened its markets with the proviso, well within OIE guidelines, that the beef be free of specified risk material, such as bone fragments. When Korean authorities detected such bone fragments in the first three shipments of U.S. beef (as well as trace levels of dioxin exceeding approved levels in the third shipment), they rejected the meat. Then, in June 2007, Korea decided to suspend all export permits to U.S. suppliers when two shipments of beef products originating from Cargill and Tyson were exported to Korea without the necessary quarantine certificates. Rather than deal with the problem, U.S. beef corporations, backed by Washington, insist that Korea change its criteria on bone fragments and start letting U.S. beef in, bone fragments and all. Otherwise there would be no FTA.
Beef and Free Trade
Other countries have already signed away the right to block U.S. meat exports, not only for BSE concerns in beef but for a whole range of food safety and animal health concerns that afflict the U.S. meat industry. The U.S. meat industry has been very careful to insist that the FTAs cannot only deal with lowering tariffs; they have to also strip countries of their rights to define their own sanitary and phytosanitary (SPS) standards in order for U.S. meat to get guaranteed market access. The big U.S. poultry companies have been particularly ferocious in this regard. For these companies, exports are critical because, with domestic demand mainly for white meat, they generate an enormous and growing surplus of chicken leg quarters (dark meat).
But most export markets refuse to take their chicken leg quarters because of food safety and animal health concerns, such as hormone and antibiotic residues, and because they undercut domestic producers with ridiculously low prices. So big U.S. poultry corporations like Tyson and Cargill look to the FTA processes as leverage to push open markets-- by simultaneously reducing or eliminating tariffs and locking countries into U.S. food safety standards.
The FTA with Morocco set an early precedent. The country drastically reduced tariffs and then agreed to accept export certificates from U.S. inspectors "as the means for certifying compliance with standards on hormones, antibiotics, and other residues" for beef and poultry. Subsequently, under a separate SPS agreement within its FTA with the United States, Panama agreed to recognize the equivalence of U.S. meat inspections and the U.S. beef grading system, to grant access to all U.S. beef exports consistent with OIE standards, and to lift its formerly strict import certification and licensing requirements.
The CAFTA agreement, which is gradually opening Central American countries to tariff-free imports of chicken leg quarters from the United States., was another important victory for U.S. poultry corporations. Given the strong, politically-connected Central American poultry companies that had grown up under trade protections, the United States was particularly concerned that the openings on tariffs agreed to under the FTA would spark "a movement among Central American poultry producers to block entry of U.S. poultry and products through the use of sanitary technical barriers."
Most of the SPS complaints coming from the United States concerning poultry are not new. El Salvador, Honduras and Costa Rica have long-standing zero tolerance policies on Salmonella, which effectively prohibits imports of raw poultry from the United States, where Salmonella is rampant in the poultry industry. Honduras also has strict policies on avian influenza that have raised the ire of the U.S. poultry industry. U.S. complaints about these measures being "arbitrary" and not based on science have not had much traction though, given that these countries are self-sufficient in poultry production. But the FTA negotiations changed the dynamic. The United States used a parallel working group on SPS to "leverage the impetus of active trade negotiations to seek difficult changes to the countries’ SPS regimes." By way of this working group, all the countries agreed to "recognize the equivalence of the U.S. food safety and inspection system - eliminating the need for plant-by-plant inspection."
The U.S.-Peru FTA was a particularly crushing win for corporate chicken. Sara Lilygren, vice president for federal government relations for Tyson Foods, called it "the best market access arrangements for poultry ever negotiated in a free trade agreement." Tyson and other U.S. poultry corporations won immediate and expanding tariff-free market access for chicken leg quarters and a specific commitment from Peru to recognize both the U.S. system for determining disease status and the U.S. inspection system for poultry slaughter and processing facilities.
"In the past, U.S. poultry exports to Peru have been blocked by Peruvian regulators on grounds that the U.S. product allegedly posed a threat of avian influenza and Newcastle disease or even Salmonella," said Tyson's Lilygren. "Hopefully, the commitments that Peru has now made to respect decisions of U.S. animal health regulators will ensure that the U.S. industry will benefit immediately from the market access provisions of the agreement and will not have those benefits blocked by the imposition of non-tariffs barriers in the form of dubious SPS requirements."
As a result, Peru and other countries that have signed similar agreements will have to accept the dumping of poor-quality U.S. meat into their markets. The impacts will be immediate and brutal for local industries, especially for the small producers. A few local companies may survive, by consolidating and expanding their operations internationally, such as the Multi Inversiones poultry group of Guatemala, which has expanded into neighboring countries and Brazil. While FTAs may conceivably give local poultry producers some access to U.S. markets, in practice the U.S. inspection system tends to block out all but the biggest. Only three poultry plants are certified for export to the U.S. in Chile, two in Costa Rica, and zero in El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, and Morocco. Poultry plants in Mexico, a large poultry producer sitting next door to the U.S. market, can only get approval to export processed poultry products slaughtered under federal inspection in the United States. Meanwhile, the big U.S. poultry companies are following-up on this new market access by buying up local producers and directly integrating them into their transnational production chains, as Cargill has recently done with the take over of two important poultry companies in Honduras and Nicaragua.
GM Food, Too
The Bush administration's attack on Korea's food safety standards through the FTA was not limited to beef. In a reported swap for Seoul easing its rules of origin for U.S. textile exports, Korea agreed to lower its domestic biosafety standards. The deal, signed on the sidelines of the final round of U.S.-Korea FTA negotiations in late March 2007, is called the U.S.-Korea "Memorandum of Understanding on Agricultural Biotechnology." Immediately hailed as a great breakthrough by the Washington-based Biotechnology Industry Organization, the agreement took Koreans by surprise, generating angry reactions in the formal political arena, in the mass media, and on the streets..
The U.S.-Korea ag-biotech agreement obliges Korea to restrict its risk assessment of imported GM products for food, feed, or processing to their "intended" use. In other words, if local farmers sow GM maize kernels from the United States that were meant for cooking, the U.S. companies responsible for the transfer of the kernels are free of any liability. This is precisely how Mexico's indigenous maize crop got contaminated. The agreement also commits Korea to act on its GM labeling laws in a "predictable" manner. This common aspect of most U.S. FTAs, which goes under the misleading label of "transparency," in fact grants Washington the right to meddle in policy decisions in Seoul. Finally, Korea's implementation of the UN Biosafety Protocol, which the United States refuses to sign, is bound to the terms of this bilateral agreement with Washington. In this case, as in other FTAs, the United States is exempt from the Protocol's documentation requirements for the entry of GM crops.
With the ink on the agreement barely dry, American GM crops began to penetrate Korea's food supply. Until recently, Korean GM laws, particularly the rules on labeling, had essentially shut GM imports out of the country's food supply, except for some use in animal feed, soybean oil, and soy sauce (the latter two products deemed exempt from mandatory labeling requirements because their production processes are said to remove the GM proteins). But in February 2008, less than a year after the signing of the ag-biotech agreement and just three months after Korea ratified and brought into force the Biosafety Protocol, the Korean Corn Processing Industry Association purchased 697,000 metric tons of U.S. GM maize for shipment between April–August 2008: the first major shipment of GM maize destined for food use to arrive in Korea since the adoption of the GM labeling law in 2000. Similarly, Korean approvals of GM imports have skyrocketed since the U.S. agreement. By January 10, 2008, there were 58 living modified organisms (LMOs) approved for import as feed or food into Korea. One month later, the number had nearly doubled: 102 approvals, 70% of them from U.S. firms (Monsanto, DuPont, and Dow).
Korea is not the first country to cede its sovereign right to control biotech foods under pressure from U.S. corporations in bilateral negotiations. India and China both backed down from GM import restrictions after bilateral "discussions" with the United States. Thailand pulled back from strict GM labeling legislation in 2004 when the United States warned that the legislation would affect their FTA negotiations. More recently, U.S. corporations have called on the U.S. government to use the proposed FTA with Thailand to force it to start allowing for field testing of GMOs. The same goes for Malaysia, where U.S. corporations want the Malaysian government to back down from consideration of mandatory labeling of GM products as a prerequisite for the proposed U.S.-Malaysia FTA. ,
Battle for Food Sovereignty
The use of bilateral free trade agreements to rig food safety standards in favor of a rapidly concentrating global food industry is cause for concern -- all the more so during a deepening world food crisis. To most people, food safety should have something to do with health, as well as cultural prerogatives. That agenda, however, has been hijacked. As tariffs and quotas are torn down under the mantra of trade liberalization, food safety is becoming a major offensive tool for industrial titans like the United States or Europe to not only get market access for exports but to reduce competition from imports (in the absence of tariff and quotas).
Equivalence, which all WTO members are supposed to implement, between different countries' food safety standards doesn't mean harmonizing up to higher standards. It means equivalence with those of the more powerful country, which frequently means harmonizing down to the lowest common denominator. The U.S.-Korea FTA bears this out dramatically.
Sad to say, food safety has become a bargaining chip in the struggle for corporate control. This raises an important challenge for the food sovereignty movement. Aside from some boycotts and recalls, real decision-making on food safety standards is not in the hands of ordinary people or even competent regulators. Instead, food safety is determined more and more in corporate boardrooms and trade negotiations. Perhaps the lessons being learned from different experiences fighting FTAs in different countries will lead to stronger campaigns to regain control over the issue of food safety within the larger battle for real food sovereignty.
Christine Ahn is a contributor to Foreign Policy In Focus, a policy analyst with the Korea Policy Institute, and a member of the Korean Americans for Fair Trade. GRAIN is an international non-governmental organization with 13 staff in nine countries spread across five continents to promote the sustainable management and use of agricultural biodiversity based on people's control over genetic resources and local knowledge. GRAIN also collaborates with www.bilaterals.org and helped produce www.fightingftas.org.
일산사람님 조금 착오가 있는 것 같네요
동 사이트(http://www.fsis.usda.gov/Regulations_&_Policies/Costa_Rica_Requirements/index.asp) 보면 쇠고기 관련 항목은 최근이 아니라 오래전에 합의된 것이네요(2006년이라네요)
최근 확정된 것은 축산(쇠고기) 가 아니라 채소, 야채 관련이네요.. 오해가 있을 수 있네요..
근데, 김종훈본부장이 예전 청문회때 "만약 다른나라가 우리나라보다 더 나은 조건으로 협정을 체결했다면 검토후 재협상을 하겠다"고 발언했었는데.
코스타리카를 비롯한 다른 나라가 미국의 요구와 협박 움직임에도 예전의 수입위생조건을 후퇴시킬 의사가 없이 계속 유지하는 것 또한 김종훈이 말한 재협상요건에 해당된다고 생각됩니다.
김종훈은 재협상 불가, 재협의(그냥 논의) 로 만족할 수 있다는 것을 확실히 할려면 다른 나라들 중 예전의 위생조건을 근본적으로(우리나라 수준으로) 수정할 의향이 있는 나라가 있는지 부터 증명해야 할 것이다.*
* 근데 어떤 나라가 그런 의향이 있다고 우리가 이야기 한다면 그것은 곧바로 외교마찰의 빌미를 제공하는 것이므로 불가능할 것이다.
그럼 결론은?
그냥 재협상해라!
이명박은 쇠고기 파동 관련하여 국민들과 네티즌에게 사기치고 협박한 각료들 모두 갈아치워라..
한나라당의 양아치들은 국민들이 직접 즐모드 만들어 주마.
이거 좀 모르시는 분이 하는 야그같네여..2004년 5월에 협의된 내용이구여..
2008년 5월 6일날 여기에 추가 개정된 내용은 딱 한줄이던데...
All Federally inspected establishments are eligible to export to Costa Rica.*
연방 정부의 검사를 받은 모든 시설은 대 코스타리카 수출에 적합하다.*
괜히 예전에 협의한거 가지고 지금한거처럼 말하는건 좀..논리에 안맞는거같네여..
원문 보면 아는 사람은 다 아는데..
