Following a previous delay while translation errors were corrected, approval of South Korea’s free trade agreement (FTA) with the European Union was further delayed by a rejection from its parliamentary subcommittee on trade and foreign affairs.

The European Parliament gave its consent to a ratification of the FTA in February this year. With the agreement having been signed in October last year, the South Korean government had also hoped for an early approval of the agreement in parliament in order to meet the July 1 deadline for the ratification which had been agreed between the two sides.

It was, however, also previously known that the FTA could meet with some parliamentary opposition as, while the South Korean government has continually pointed to the substantial benefits arising from the agreement, some members of parliament have been insisting that there should be a full examination of its terms, particularly due to its possible deleterious effect on certain sectors of the South Korean economy, such as the agricultural sector.

In fact, the difficulty experienced in the six-member parliamentary subcommittee appears to have been due both to the government’s attempt to rush the bill through parliament, as well as a call for protection or assistance to be given to South Korea’s pig and dairy farmers.

It is expected that the bill to approve the FTA will now go to a full committee meeting, in which the government should again hold a majority, but there remains some doubt whether the government will be able to obtain passage of the bill by the end of this month, as they wished.

April 19^th, 2011

Source: tax-news.com

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