Seoul: South Korea and the US reached no agreement on renegotiating their free trade pact decried by President Donald Trump as a “horrible deal” a top Seoul official said yesterday after meeting US counterparts.
The US administration under Trump has been seeking to revise the pact, signed by former President Barack Obama and which Trump slammed as a “job killer”.
“For many, many years, the United States has suffered through massive trade defici ts... we’ll be changing that,” Trump said during a June 30 summit with new South Korean President Moon Jae-In.
South Korea—Asia’s fourth-largest economy and the seventh-largest trading partner of the US—has maintained there is no clear link between the pact and the US trade deficit.
Trade officials from both sides gathered in Seoul yesterday after Washington called a meeting, but failed to reach “any agreement”, Seoul’s trade minister Kim Hyun-Chong told reporters.
“We did not agree with the unilateral demand by the US to revise the Korea-US FTA” (free trade agreement),
Kim said, adding no date had been set for a further meeting.
“We also explained that the US trade deficit is a result of a complex array of factors on micro and macro levels, not a result of the Korea-US FTA,” he said.
