Additional FTA Negotiations

At the additional Free Trade Agreement (FTA) negotiations on June 21, tensions ran high between negotiators from Korea and the United States discussing revisions of agreements on labor, environment and other fields.

Korea’s chief negotiator Kim Jong-hoon and U.S. trade representative Wendy Cutler began additional negotiations on the U.S. requests across seven fields, including labor, environment, and pharmaceuticals, at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade building located in Jongro-gu, Seoul.

As expected, the U.S. called on the problem of applying “general dispute procedures” to labor and environment issues. They wanted to create retaliatory measures, such as cutting off tax benefits or forcing monetary compensation on countries that breach agreements.

The previous settlements agreed upon on April 2 require nations that violate agreements in those two fields to pay a maximum of 15 million dollars in penalty fees to be used to improve labor and environment conditions of the country.

Authorities said, “The application of general dispute procedures means deleting parts of the previous contract and recreating them again. We need to carefully examine the ulterior motives of the U.S. and weigh to what degree we will accept the terms.”

Excluding the labor and environment fields, both countries generally conceded the need to specify previous settlements on the rest of the five fields.

Korean representatives are planning to demand compromises on the expansion of professional occupation visa quotas depending on the position the U.S. takes.

abc@donga.com