Just noticed this editorial on the WTO talks in the Joongang Ilbo English edition - I gagged reading it. Let me just reprint the most asinine section below:
Korea will be in the difficult position of pursuing two goals at the same time. It should try to open the doors to the agricultural sector minimally while trying to open the doors to the manufacturing sector, which has much more weight in our economy, to the maximum, so that it can increase its exports of industrial goods. Therefore, it needs more sophisticated logic, a proactive negotiating posture and international cooperation.
More sophisticated logic? What’s required is not so much “more sophisticated logic” as the ability to get other nations to abandon their rational faculties all together. You want countries like China, Australia, Argentina, and yes, the United States to open their markets nice and wide to Korean industrial exports, while keeping your own domestic market closed to their agricultural exports? What negotiating partner in its right mind would accept such a deal? And the minute you go in and try to push South Korea - an OECD member, one of the world’s largest exporters of consumer electronics, cars, steel, and semiconductors. and a major foreign investor abroad - as a “developing country,” you’re going to get laughed out of the conference room. Can you imagine the United States going to Cancun crying “developing nation” status because its steel and consumer electronics industries have been ravished by South Korean and Japanese exports?
And the Joongang bitches that Korea hasn’t a single bilateral free trade agreement with another country… perhaps that’s because much of the political elite doesn’t seem to believe in free trade. As the richest kids in the neighborhood, South Korea and Japan could assume their rightful places as engines of growth in East Asia if only they would drop this neo-mercantalist bullshit - being a responsible trading partner means beings willing to suck up cheap agricultural exports from places like China, Thailand, and the Philippines. Regional economic integration in this region will go nowhere until politicians (and the interest groups that support them) in Seoul and Tokyo undergo radical attitude adjustments.
