President Lee Jae-myung on the 8th ordered the government not to file an application to join the Comprehensive and Progressive Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) within this year. The presidential office asked ministries not to set deadlines and to keep talking with farmers and fishers.
Presidential spokesperson Kang Yoo-jung said in a written briefing on the 8th that President Lee Jae-myung had ordered the government not to apply to join the CPTPP this year. According to Kyunghyang Shinmun, Lee also asked ministries not to set deadlines and to keep listening to, and talking with, farmers and fishers.
광고 문의 · 300×250The presidential office said the CPTPP push must rest on the trust and consensus of struggling farmers and fishers, and Kang stressed that restoring trust between the government and these groups comes first. The delay coincides with rising farmer anger over recent comprehensive farmland surveys and is read as an effort to calm rural discontent.
Background to the farm-sector backlash
The Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy recently released an analysis saying that joining the CPTPP would raise manufacturing output by about 6.7 trillion won a year on average while agriculture, forestry and fisheries would fall by 850 billion won. Farm and fishing groups took this as a sign that agriculture would be sacrificed for manufacturing and pushed back hard. The CPTPP is a multilateral free trade agreement among 12 Asia-Pacific countries including Japan, Australia and Canada.
At the October 6 cabinet meeting Lee had already acknowledged the CPTPP’s strategic value amid upheaval in the global trade order while noting strong concern in agriculture and fisheries, telling the government not to rush to a predetermined conclusion and to restart dialogue from scratch. Kang called the pact a serious option for a country that aims to be a trading power, but stressed that trade policy directly affects people’s daily lives.
Filling the gap in the rural cooperation fund
The presidential office said the 1 trillion won agriculture-fisheries cooperation fund promised when the National Assembly ratified the 2015 Korea-China FTA is 700 billion won short, and that the government will cover it with public funds. Lee said 200 billion won will go into next year’s budget, with 500 billion won added later, to bring the fund above 1 trillion won.
The decision means the CPTPP accession process will not start this year at the earliest. Trade authorities now must handle the pact’s strategic value and farmers’ concerns together, and the timing of any application next year or later appears to depend on the outcome of talks with rural communities.
