[Opinion] Kim Sung-hoon vs. Kim Jong-hoon

“When 30 million were in bed, we were awake and fellow farmers cried out…” This is the opening line of “Nongminga (Farmers’ Song), which was used by pro-democracy activists in the 1980s. Sangji University President Kim Sung-hoon, who served under the Kim Dae-jung administration as its first agriculture minister, wrote the song as a college student in the early 1960s. His love affair with farmers is more than unique.

As minister, Kim abolished the irrigation tax as long demanded by farmers. Most Koreans, however, remember him as the one who laid the groundwork for Korea’s loss of the garlic industry to China in 2000. That memory has left an indelible scar on his mind and a grudge against the Foreign Ministry, which took charge of Sino-Korean negotiations then. When President Lee Myung-bak this year mentioned the notorious garlic agreement in his second public apology, Kim’s patience ran out.

When Trade Minister Kim Jong-hoon announced the results of additional beef talks with the United States, Kim Sang-hoon snapped in a media interview, saying, “Kim [Jong-hoon] is cheating the country. He blundered in the negotiations and is also threatening us with the idea of trade retaliation.” This, in turn, caused a fuming Kim Jong-hoon to tell the media, “Kim [Sung-hoon] knows better than that. On his insistence, Korea imposed a tariff of 315 percent on Chinese garlic, a move which backfired and hurt our economy. He truly knows what it means to retaliate in trade.”

We do not know how bad Kim Sung-hoon feels about trade negotiators in the Foreign Ministry. He served the country as a minister and now heads a university. Still, the former agriculture minister alleges that 650,000 Americans suffer from mad cow disease, a completely idiotic statement. He also said, ”Medical teams at Yale University and the University of Pittsburgh have discovered through autopsies that 13 percent of people who died of dementia actually succumbed to mad cow disease. Thus, applying this ratio, we can estimate that 4.5 million Americans suffer from mad cow disease.” No concrete evidence supports his allegations. What is known for sure is that the disease has killed only three people in the United States from the disease, but all of them had lived for long periods in Britain or Saudi Arabia prior to moving to the United States.

Editorial Writer Kim Chang-hyeok (chang@donga.com)