Explaining away broken FTA promises
The Hankyoreh, Seoul
Explaining away broken FTA promises
By Park Sooun-bin, Economics Editor
1 December 2010
It happened right after the signing of the Uruguay Round Agricultural Agreement on Dec. 15, 1993. At the time, opposition parties and farmers’ groups raised strenuous objections to the outcome of the negotiations. They asked the government if it was possible to enter new negotiations and revise the plan for market opening. They were asking for a bit more time for Korean farmers to prepare. The response from government officials was adamant: “Not a single dot or line can be revised.”
The officials pointed to international precedents, arguing that if they began negotiations again on an agreement that had already been reached once, the changes would inevitably be to the detriment of South Korea. The argument worked, and Korean farmers had to abandon their hopes for renewed negotiations.
A few months later, the officials were caught in their lie: some of the content in the final government enforcement plan submitted to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) secretariat differed from what had been announced domestically. The government had revised the content through bilateral negotiations with the U.S. The people of South Korea were up in arms when it became known that the government had bowed to U.S. calls for revisions after having silenced the demands of Korean farmers with the claim that it was impossible to change even a single dot on the agreement.
The Prime Minister went to work quieting the storm, releasing a statement of apology to the people. The Cheong Wa Dae, (the presidential office in South Korea or Blue House), led by then-President Kim Young-sam, replaced Agriculture Minister Kim Yang-bae just three months into his term, saying it was because he had “deceived the people.” These are the circumstances of the so-called “UR Incident.”
The Uruguay Round Agricultural Agreement seventeen years ago was both a nightmare and an object lesson for the officials in charge of overseas trade negotiations. They realized what could happen if they deceived the people of South Korea. However, it seems like so much “erased history” for the trade officials currently renegotiating the South Korea-U.S. free trade agreement. The process currently unfolding is all too similar to the way things transpired seventeen years before.
As recently as one month ago, Trade Minister Kim Jong-hoon declared, “There will not be a single period or comma altered in the agreement.”
But after a meeting between the Minister Kim and U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk in Seoul on Nov. 8 to 10, it was a different story. Now the agreement could be changed because of U.S. demands. When asked why the story had changed, Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade FTA negotiator Choi Seok-young defended Kim, saying, “I believe it is very inappropriate in terms of negotiation strategy for a negotiation representative to say he is opening up an agreement that was already reached.” In other words, the “no renegotiations” stand was in fact a negotiation strategy.
For this explanation to be convincing, the Lee administration would have to also put on the negotiating table certain problematic provisions in the FTA that have been the subject of vociferous objections by politicians and civil society. The Lee administration’s position, however, is that these will only be “limited renegotiations” dealing just with the area of automobiles, as demanded by the United States, and even those will be concluded within the month. Apparently, the “no renegotiations” argument was intended not as a strategy for negotiations with the United States, but only as a means of quashing critical sentiment domestically.
Indeed, the trade officials changing their stories is nothing new. It was also seen with the issue of exempting imported U.S. cars from environmental regulations, one of the core items of contention in these renegotiations. Ever since beginning negotiations with the United States in the 2006, Kim Jong-hoon has insisted over and over again that no concessions whatsoever would be made in the areas of environment and public health. Perhaps as a reflection of this, Article 20.3 of the concluded agreement text stipulates, “The Parties recognize that it is inappropriate to encourage trade or investment by weakening or reducing the protections afforded in its environmental laws.”
Currently, however, the administration is mulling over waiving environmental regulations on U.S. imports, which sell fewer than 10 thousand units per year. Their justification is that the impact is slight given the scale of the South Korean automobile market. What kind of environmental regulations apply differently to larger and smaller factories? The logic of the U.S. delegation, in contrast, is straightforward: it costs more money to produce different cars to meet the Korean environmental standards.
Negotiations between countries to form a trade pact are a matter of “framing interests.” Before hurrying to concluded renegotiations on the KORUS FTA, Kim Jong-hoon should first ask himself whose interests he is working for. Article 7.1 of the Republic of Korea’s Constitution reads, “Public officials shall be servants of the people and shall be responsible to the people.”
The views presented in this column are the writer’s own, and do not necessarily reflect those of The Hankyoreh.
