South Korea says to take time in allowing in U.S. beef

SEOUL (Reuters) - A South Korean official said on Monday the country would move slowly in allowing back U.S. beef imports so as to calm an angry public that has staged mass street protests for weeks against the product.

South Korea and the United States at the weekend said they had reached a private-sector deal to restrict trade in U.S. beef to cattle under 30 months and forbid exports of other parts that are thought to pose a higher risk for mad cow disease.

"The process may take a while," a farm ministry spokesman said, adding his ministry plans to examine and implement the reworked import deal carefully.

Hours after the revised beef deal was announced, a violent protest erupted in central Seoul. Rallies started in early May against the beef deal and later mushroomed into protests against new President Lee Myung-bak, throwing his government in crisis.

Internet message boards in the world's most wired country have been filled with posts by South Koreans wondering if the private-sector deal is enough to prevent material they feel poses a high risk for mad cow disease from entering the country.

The number of protesters has dropped in recent weeks, and a poll taken on Friday by a major newspaper said 60 percent of South Koreans thought it was time to end them.

But analysts said a misstep by Lee could spark a new round of mass street rallies.

"If people don't buy what the government is saying, they will harbor more doubts about the sincerity of the administration," said Chun Sangjin, a sociology professor at Sogang University.

Lee has been criticized for building expectations through pledges that seem overly ambitious, such as 6 percent growth this year for his export-driven country, a target economists deem almost unattainable in the face of soaring world oil prices and a global economic slowdown.

Prime Minister Han Seung-soo said at a cabinet meeting on Monday the government would press for strict quarantine inspections and labeling guidelines to ease concerns about health risks.

"Although some see the (beef) deal as unsatisfactory, we believe the result of the additional negotiations is more than we had expected," presidential spokesman Lee Dong-kwan said.

RISK FOR FREE TRADE DEAL

South Korea's trade minister, who went to Washington last week to revise the beef deal reached in April, had said the legal procedures starting the flow of U.S. meat back into what once was the third-largest overseas market for the product could start as early as this week.

President Lee's conservative Grand National Party said on Sunday that was too fast.

Lee struck the beef import deal to help improve prospects for a sweeping trade pact with the United States, which surveys said could boost two-way trade, valued at $78 billion a year, by about $20 billion.

U.S. lawmakers said Congress would not approve the trade deal, which has not been ratified in South Korea, unless Seoul fully opened its market to U.S. beef.

President Lee, who scored a landslide win in a December vote, last week apologized for the beef deal and started to shake up his four-month-old government in hopes of trying to reverse a sharp drop in his public support rate.

Analysts said Lee, who vowed to be the "economy president", could not implement reforms such as privatization of state firms and corporate tax cuts unless he could win back a public that saw him as out of touch with its concerns.

(Additional reporting by Kim Junghyun and Jack Kim, editing by Jon Herskovitz and Ben Tan)