All fired up over Korea-US free trade
By Donald Kirk
WASHINGTON - They no doubt would never admit it, but conservative US business people share common cause with radical Korean activists in one of the most contentious debates ever to break out between US and South Korean negotiators.
The debate has implications for the US-Korean military alliance but revolves for now around a historic US-Korean Free Trade Agreement (FTA), reached at the eleventh hour on Monday just as
it appeared the talks had failed.
US and South Korean officials confirmed the deal on Sunday in Washington - Monday in Asia - after marathon negotiations that went right up to the final deadline decreed by the 90-day period under which the US Congress must accept or reject it but cannot amend it.
In the face of protests on both sides of the Pacific, Korean and American leaders are confident that the agreement will open up each other's markets and wipe away tariffs on all but a few products.
US President George W Bush and South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun discussed the deal for 20 minutes on the telephone last week, each of them sure that the plusses of opening up trade outweighed the minuses of vituperations in both countries.
The FTA, however flawed, ranks as the biggest for the United States since the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was signed 15 years ago and began opening up US-Mexican commerce two years later.
So intense is the opposition, however, that debate before final legislative approval of the agreement may compromise the benefits of an anticipated increase of as much as 20% above last year's record US$75 billion in two-way trade between the two countries.
A South Korean man who tried to burn himself to death on Monday might just as well have been sacrificing his life on the altar of US motor-vehicle manufacturers as on that of South Korean farmers. They're both lined up as hostile to a deal that they believe passionately can only harm their best interests - though clearly they differ in ways of expressing their opposition.
The Americans are counting on a Democratic-controlled Congress either to stick up for their interests in fine-tuning any FTA or else somehow to derail it entirely. Similarly, South Korean activists are certain their violent protests will make it impossible for their country to open up to competition that they believe will destroy their livelihoods.
To head off abject failure after 10 months of yakking at each other, the US and South Korea came to final terms by midday on Monday Korean time, one day after what they said had been the "final deadline".
The significance of the 90-day time frame is that the US Congress, well before the Democrats gained control of both houses last November, granted "fast-track" authority until July 1 for Bush to sign the agreement with Korea subject only to a yes-no vote by Congress.
Bush immediately began the process by formally notifying Congress of the agreement 90 days before his authority expired. In his letter, released around midnight Sunday in the eastern US, Monday afternoon in Korea, Bush argued that the FTA would not only "generate export opportunities" for Americans but would also create "better-paying jobs" in the US and "save money" for American consumers by "offering them greater choices".
While firebrand demonstrators were standing up against rows of police in Seoul, Democratic leaders in Washington made it their duty to stand up against the Republican administration, demanding concessions to demands on critical points in the agreement. Congress, though, cannot actually try to water down
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All fired up over Korea-US free trade
By Donald Kirk
or otherwise alter the agreement as long as members have 90 days in which to conduct their "review".
It's still possible that Congress will reject the agreement by a majority No vote, but the sense among negotiators is that the deal will sail through by a narrow margin. It's also expected to win begrudging approval from South Korea's National Assembly despite inevitable criticism from the opposition Grand National
Party, a conservative grouping that has regained much of its traditional power while Roh's popularity has fallen precipitously in recent months.
US Democratic leaders, though, are sure to wage a non-stop battle against the FTA as it now stands. They signaled their views in a letter last week to the US special trade representative, Susan Schwab.
The language of the letter evoked memories of the Cold War between the US and the Soviet Union by its use of the term "iron curtain", the descriptive phrase popularized by British leader Winston Churchill when he remarked in a speech at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, on March 5, 1946, that "an iron curtain" had descended over Europe as a result of the Soviet Union's takeover of Eastern European countries after World War II.
The agreement, said the letter, is "completely inadequate in the face of Korea's long-standing iron curtain to American manufactured products". The signers, led by Nancy Pelosi, the San Francisco congresswoman who is now the Speaker of the House of Representatives, was also signed by two other influential Democratic members of Congress, Charles Rangel, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, and Sander Levin, chairman of the Ways and Means Subcommittee on Trade.
They singled out for special criticism the yawning gap between the export of more than 800,000 Korean motor vehicles to the US last year compared with 4,000 US vehicles sold in South Korea. The disparity in motor vehicles alone, said US legislators, is $11 billion - 82% of the total US deficit in trade with South Korea.
Schwab vowed that the US side would not accept any deal that failed to provide "comprehensive market access to US business", including the automotive sector, but US manufacturers have long cited a range of non-tariff barriers, including difficult inspections, that make it almost impossible to compete effectively in the Korean mass market.
If anything, differences were still more contentious in such areas as textiles, beef and, above all, rice. Ever since the negotiations began 10 months ago, farmers, spurred on by leftist students and other activists, have been demonstrating daily against moves to open up the $9 billion South Korean rice market, charging that any deal would strip them of their only means of survival.
The fact is that the price of rice in South Korea is pegged at four or five times its actual value, and the government props up the market by buying surplus rice, several hundred thousand tonnes of which is shipped each year to North Korea, which is suffering from starvation and disease as a result of poor harvests and terrible economic policies. The whole issue of the price of rice, however, is deemed so "sensitive" in South Korea that the government more or less ruled it out of any FTA except as a topic that might be considered "at a future date" - if ever.
The beef issue hit the headlines after South Korean customs officials barred the first three shipments after partially lifting a ban imposed on US beef in response to the diagnosis of "mad cow" disease in a US cow more than three years ago. Inspectors said that X-rays had discovered tiny bone chips in beef that was supposed to have been entirely bone-free, and ordered the beef shipped back to the US. American negotiators demanded reinstatement of the export of US beef, bone-free or not, to South Korea, one of the largest markets for US beef until the ban.
Demonstrators, typically carrying candles in paper cups, have clashed with police during the negotiations and marched through central Seoul, singing songs and shouting slogans denouncing Bush and the US-Korean alliance.
Farmers' groups and industrial workers have joined anti-FTA rallies, while radicals have seized on the FTA as another reason for opposing the US-Korean military alliance.
One issue that appeared muted, however, was that of including products made by South Korean companies in the special industrial zone at Kaesong, just across the line inside North Korea, as manufactured in the South. US negotiators adamantly rejected that demand. Demonstrators overlooked that issue while flaunting placards and banners, in Korean and English, saying "Stop the Korea-US FTA" - one of the milder slogans - along with denunciations of US forces.
Journalist Donald Kirk has been covering Korea - and the confrontation of forces in Northeast Asia - for more than 30 years.
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