ISDS Case Map
Korea
South Korea's political parties said Wednesday that renegotiating a recent trade deal with the United States is unacceptable.
The full text of the free trade agreement with the United States has been released. To the masses who have grown weary of the almost two months of the government's self-congratulatory propaganda about how well it did in the negotiations that ended in April, the news is like welcome rain after a long drought. Did not someone say the trade deal was "like a second founding of the nation," in order to say the economic negotiations are the biggest news since Dangun's founding of the Korean nation in 2333 B.C.E.?
The US-South Korea free trade agreement comes at precisely the moment when America's military presence on the Korean Peninsula is rapidly diminishing, anti-US nationalism in South Korea is growing and China is playing an ever more important leadership role in the region. "This FTA is about countering China," says Yang Sung Chul, a former US ambassador to South Korea, now professor at Korea University in Seoul. "It's much more significant in strategic than economic terms."
The actual document that is slated to be ratified as the free trade agreement between South Korea and the United States has been made public. As expected, there were quite a few sections the public never knew about that would be disadvantageous for Korea.
American advisory committees gave divided and mixed evaluations of a proposed South Korea-US free trade agreement, the opinions sometimes differing even within an industry.
The White House has made details of the US-South Korea Free Trade Agreement available to the public, and according to the National Pork Producers Council, US pork producers have a lot to be happy about: an additional $10 per pig as a result.
South Korea and the United States on Friday released the full text of their free trade agreement, a disclosure that reignited controversy here as critics say the accord will only benefit American companies, while destroying the lives of Korean farmers and other workers.
South Korea and the United States have been in discussions to release the full text of a bilateral free trade agreement (FTA) on Friday, a senior trade official said Wednesday, amid an indication that the deal's renegotiation is imminent.
Korean President Roh Moo-hyun said Seoul's signing of a free-trade pact with Beijing is inevitable but the timing must be right.
