It wasn’t as close as two minutes before midnight, but it was signed at just 22 minutes to midnight. Negotiators for the United States and South Korea reached a free-trade agreement just that much before an inflexible deadline that would have rendered further talks pointless.
They were under the gun because Trade Promotion Authority requires the president to give Congress 90 days notice before he signs a trade pact. With TPA currently set to expire at the end of June, it meant that any new trade deals essentially needed to be concluded on April 2.
South Korea’s top negotiator, Kim Jong-hoon, compared the urgency of the deadline to a kind of driving aggravation that we’ve all experienced: “When you miss an expressway junction, you are bound to lose time and money.”
That’s for sure. And even though we made the right turn at the intersection on April 2, we still haven’t reached our final destination: There’s another junction looming just ahead, and we may have to swerve across a couple lanes of traffic to get there.
The accord with South Korea now joins agreements with Colombia, Peru, and Panama that await congressional action. If the President signs the agreement before June 30 (the Columbia and Peru agreements have his signature) and Congress considers them during this session, they’ll receive up-or-down votes under the rules of TPA.
The deal with South Korea is big. In fact, it’s the biggest trade pact the United States has negotiated since the North American Free Trade Agreement in the early 1990s.
Early signs from Congress are not encouraging. Many of the politicians elected last November campaigned against international trade. Although Rep. Charles Rangel, head of the House Ways and Means Committee, has extended an olive branch to the Bush administration on trade, plenty of his colleagues would love for these discussions to collapse. Sen. Max Baucus, another powerful voice on trade issues, already has announced tentative opposition to the South Korea agreement.
Yet there is much to like about this pact. The Wall Street Journal says total trade between the United States and South Korea could approach $100 billion in just a few years, up from $75 billion last year. Much of the benefit will flow to American producers, as famously protectionist South Korea has promised to open its market to all kinds of products.
They should cheer the deal in Detroit. South Korea has pledged to drop its tariffs on imported cars, which means that one of the world’s most closed auto markets--only 3.5 percent of the cars sold in South Korea last year were built abroad--will suddenly become available.
American farmers will come out ahead as well. Under the deal, half of all current agricultural exports to South Korea will become duty free immediately. Other tariffs will be phased out over the next five years.
Beef is one of the exceptions to this rule. In 2003, South Korea banned beef from the United States following a mad-cow scare. The public-health concerns have vanished, but the prohibition nonetheless has remained in place. As a result, South Koreans currently pay some of the highest beef prices in the world.
Their government would have been wise to drop this tariff unilaterally, if only to help consumers in Seoul. Instead, it has chosen to phase out a beef tariff over the course of 15 years. Senator Baucus and I agree on this point: 15 years is too long.
I wonder if U.S. negotiators might have reached a better deal if they weren’t pressured by the TPA deadline. Perhaps they could have held out for something a little better.
Yet I’m reluctant to let the perfect become the enemy of the good, and this trade agreement is definitely good. By letting Americans sell more of what we make and grow to South Koreans, it will enrich us all.
Given a choice to sell some beef or no beef to South Korea, I choose some beef.
One of the sure signs that this is a good deal comes from South Korea itself, where the local protectionists are already screaming hysterically: They know that this accord will force inefficient sectors of their economy to compete with Americans.
They may not want this result, but we should welcome it. Congress ought to pass this agreement as soon as possible--or at least before the clock on TPA ticks out.
Dean Kleckner, an Iowa farmer, chairs Truth About Trade & Technology. Mr. Kleckner is a former American Farm Bureau president.
News 
It wasn’t as close as two minutes before midnight, but it was signed at just 22 minutes to midnight. Negotiators for the United States and South Korea reached a free-trade agreement just that much before an inflexible deadline that would have rendered further talks pointless.
