A sweeping free trade agreement with the United States looks set for a rough ride through the South Korean legislature after opposition parties branded it a "humiliating and treacherous" deal. But the ruling Grand National Party with a majority 172 seats in the 299-seat parliament welcomed it as a "win-win deal" and pledged to try its best to ratify the trade bill.
Trade negotiators from the two countries finalised the details of the FTA in Washington on Friday after a three-year stalemate on auto tariffs. Under the renegotiated agreement, the US will be allowed to keep its 2.5 percent tariff on cars for five years, while South Korea would immediately cut its present eight percent tariff in half.
South Korea will also ease car safety and environmental standards so that each US automaker will be allowed to export 25,000 cars per year - four times the current level - which meet only US safety requirements, rather than the more stringent South Korean ones.
In return, South Korea will be allowed to extend by two years a 25 percent tariff on frozen pork imported from the US, Trade Minister Kim Jong-Hoon told reporters Sunday. South Korean imports of the meat from the US were worth about 160 million dollars last year.
Kim said the new agreement is "a by-product that equally reflected each side's interests" but admitted a concession was needed in the disputed auto tariff to help clear the passage of the deal in Washington. "We took the US concerns into account considering a certain platform was needed to clear political barriers in the US to push ahead with the FTA deal (because of the) difficult situation of the US auto industry," he said.
But opposition party lawmakers in Seoul were left fuming at what they said was a "humiliating" agreement with too many concessions for Washington and too little in return for Seoul.
"We have been hit by the North with cannons and now we're being hit by the US with the economy," said Park Jie-Won, floor leader of the Democratic Party, referring to last month's artillery assault by Pyongyang on a border island, which killed four South Koreans.
The new agreement is a "humiliating and treacherous deal that prevents South Korea's access to the US auto market, which should be a key pillar of the FTA," the party said in a statement. Park said he would organise a national campaign to oppose the deal and pledged to block the bill in the National Assembly. Jun Byung-Hun, another party leader, called the result "tragic," urging President Lee Myung-Bak to apologise to the public and reopen negotiations. "We urge him to immediately fire Trade Minister Kim who failed in the negotiations," he said.
Kwon Sun-Taik, floor leader of the Liberty Forward Party, said the negotiators "cheated the public" by reneging on a pledge not to cave in to Washington's demands.
"The concession they garnered in the livestock products was not even a major, fundamental one, so it was a deal that failed to meet national interests," he said. Past attempts by the ruling party to push through an earlier FTA deal led to violent clashes with opposition party lawmakers involving fistfights.
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