The Pacific Alliance will begin negotiations for a Free Trade Agreement (FTA) with South Korea in the first half of 2022, that bloc reported on Wednesday.
With this, South Korea, upon concluding these negotiations and putting the FTA into force, will become an Associated State of the Pacific Alliance.
This position was included as part of the Joint Declaration of the XVI Summit of the Pacific Alliance, held in Colombia.
The Pacific Alliance Summit was attended by the presidents of Chile, Sebastián Piñera; from Colombia, Ivan Duque; of Peru, Pedro Castillo, and the Secretary of the Treasury of Mexico, Rogelio Ramírez de la O.
According to the World Trade Organization (WTO), South Korea continues to actively enter into regional trade agreements (RTAs) with its major trading partners.
At the regional level, in November 2020 it signed the Regional Broad Economic Association Agreement (RCEP), which entered into force in 2022.
In addition, in 2018, it signed an ARC with five Central American countries: Costa Rica, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Panama.
At the bilateral level, the Korea-UK CRA was signed in August 2019 and entered into force on January 1, 2021.
Pacific alliance
South Korea also concluded negotiations for an RTA with Israel in August 2019, which has not been signed.
On the other hand, the Korea-Indonesia RTA was signed on December 18, 2020, but has not been ratified.
The RTA with the United States was modified in 2018.
In 2018 and 2019, Korea notified the WTO of its intention to suspend concessions and other obligations applied to certain imports from the United States and the EU in response to the adoption by these Members of safeguard measures in relation to certain export products. .
The South Korean authorities have indicated that all of Korea’s RTAs partially cover agriculture, although rice is excluded.
In addition, South Korea also grants preferential tariff treatment to a limited number of products imported from other developing countries, including those covered by the Global System of Trade Preferences among Developing Countries (GSTP), and by the GATT Protocol on Trade Negotiations among Developing Countries (TNDC).
