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At a time when speculation and rumors about events in North Korea are especially active, it should be noted how little of what one reads about that nation is grounded in concrete knowledge and experience. Partly this is due to the North Koreans’ tight hold on the dissemination of information, but it also results from the preference of Western journalists for dealing in boilerplate generalizations and cartoon images. It is not often that one can get an inside view of the DPRK [Democratic People’s Republic of Korea – the formal name for North Korea], however circumscribed the travel routes. Christine Ahn, one of the foremost activists on Korean and globalization issues, visited North Korea in early July, just days after the demolition of the cooling tower at the Yongbyon nuclear reactor. She shares her experiences in the DPRK with us. [Elich] You’ve just returned from the DPRK. As co-coordinator, you helped organize this trip under the auspices of the DPRK Education and Exposure Program (DEEP). Tell us about DEEP and your reasons for organizing this expedition. [Ahn] The DPRK Education and Exposure Program was started in 2001 by a group of Korean Americans living in New York who were inspired by the reunification talks underway between the north and south. The goal was to bring young, socially-minded Korean-Americans to the northern part of our homeland to see and experience North Korea with an open mind and heart, which is definitely challenging because of the vilification of North Koreans by the media and the governments of the United States and South Korea. We expect participants to read a tremendous amount about Korean history, especially the experience of Koreans under Japanese colonization and the Korean War, as well as current issues facing North Korea, such as the famine, de-nuclearization and human rights. In addition, we organize a fundraising drive each year to raise money to purchase essential medical supplies to donate to a hospital in Pyongyang. This was the 7th DEEP delegation and the largest and most diverse delegation with Koreans coming from New York, Los Angeles, and the San Francisco Bay Area. But we also had Korean Canadians and some Korean Americans who grew up in Japan, which made our understanding of the relationship between war and division and the migration of Koreans much more multifaceted! For ten days, we traveled throughout Pyongyang, Sariwon and Kaesong. We visited many historical sites, and had the chance to interact with students from the Pyongyang Architecture and Planning University and from the Youth League. We met with officials from the Women’s League and the head of the Maternity Hospital in Pyongyang. We also attended several lectures with a professor from the Pyongyang University of Education and the head of the Medical Doctors Association to better understand the social and economic conditions facing North Korea. We also spoke at length with two elderly men who were unconverted long-term political prisoners that were repatriated to North Korea after spending nearly 40 years in South Korean prisons. It was a very jam-packed trip with so much to observe, absorb, and process. Although we realize we saw only a small part of the country, we feel fortunate to have seen and experienced as much as we did on this part of our divided homeland. [Elich] I would like to start with Kaesong. What is the town like? I’m interested in both what the town is like in terms of daily life there, and in terms of architecture and historical sites dating back to the period of the Koryo Dynasty, when Kaesong was the capital of Korea. Did you see anything of the industrial complex there? There are now 72 South Korean firms operating at the Kaesong industrial complex, which is undergoing rapid expansion. The number of North Korean workers at these plants now numbers over 30,000. [Ahn] Kaesong is approximately two hours south of Pyongyang. My sense when we drove through the center of the city was that the architecture, much like Pyongyang, seemed to be of the Soviet-style era, and things seemed to be bleaker there than in the capital. There were few cars on the road, many people on bicycles and workers in the fields. As for the industrial complex, I remember seeing massive construction machinery beyond a wall along the road, but we weren’t able to go on a tour of the complex. When I asked one of our guides what they thought about capitalism seeping out from Kaesong, his response was that because the people of Kaesong have lived so close to the DMZ, they are among the most politicized in the country. I also recall that North Koreans viewed Kaesong as a model of “tongil,” or reunification, and that it would be a microcosm of how the challenges, as well as the nuts and bolts, of reunification would be negotiated. The drive down there was breathtakingly beautiful–lush fields of farmland and rolling green hills. When we drove to Panmunjom along the DMZ—ironically enough on the 4th of July—you could see why it is one of the most ecologically diverse regions in the world. Despite apparently having 1.2 million land mines planted along the DMZ, for miles it is just lush green farmland with snowy egrets everywhere. From the North Korean side, you look across at the towering South Korean/US building. There are large surveillance cameras and as one participant noted, the building had a “nightmarish quality akin to Terminator 2.” On the side of the building facing North Korea is a sign with the words in Korean, “House of Freedom.” As we looked from the rooftop across the DMZ, we asked one of our guides what he thought about that sign and his response was, “People who know least what that term means throw it around the most.” One of my colleagues on the trip noted that when she lived in South Korea, she deliberately avoided visiting the DMZ because one could only do so on a tour with the USO. As we left Punmunjom on the North Korean side, we drove under a cement archway that read in large Korean characters, Chaju Tongil, “reunification on our own terms.” After the DMZ, we then visited the Tomb of King Wang Gun, the Koryo Historical Museum, and Sunjuk Bridge. The Tomb of Wang Gun was reconstructed after Kim Il Sung had visited the site. Our guide shared many allegories about the King and Kim Il Sung’s visit, but the one that stuck in my memory was about King Wang Gun’s advisors. Like many kings, Wang Gun had a military, political and economic advisor, but he also had a dream interpreter. This advisor, however, had a penchant for drinking and so the King forbade him to drink more than just one bowl full of wine a day, which the dream interpreter translated to mean a jug. This angered the King who then imprisoned him for 12 years, but thereafter released him and forgave him. Behind the tomb was a stone shaped into a lotus that symbolized the period before the Confucianist era when Buddhism reigned. We also went to two other places, the Koryo Historical Museum and the Sunjuk Bridge. We arrived at the Koryo Historical Museum quite late, and because there was no electricity it was difficult to see the artifacts and paintings. Clearly much of the museum’s artifacts were recreated either because the original was destroyed in the war or pillaged. In any case, the Song Gyun Gwan–the building adjacent to the museum–was a study hall where yangbans (scholars) would take exams. They pointed out that the building was 400 years older than the one in Seoul and built during the Koryo period. We then went to the Sunjuk Bridge where our guides shared another allegory about a dual that took place between Lee Song-Gae, a leader from Chosun and Chong Mong-Joo from the Koryo dynasty. Chong Mong-Joo was murdered on the bridge where a bamboo, which symbolizes loyalty, later grew. The stone bridge story seemed to be told as a narrative of transition and to convey that Chosun did not efface Koryo or obliterate the past, but instead chose to enshrine and pay homage to the past. How that should be interpreted today remains ambiguous. What all these stories mean, I cannot even begin to interpret, but it is worth noting how these ancient historical sites were actually re-created after Kaesong was completely destroyed. What remains is a handful of artifacts and the oral histories to preserve Korea’s past. [Elich] Did you have an opportunity to observe anything of agricultural development there? [Ahn] On the day we traveled to visit the Sinchon massacre museum, we spent the morning visiting Migok cooperative farm in Sariwon, in Hwanghae Province. This was my sixth visit to a farm in North Korea, and I was overwhelmed by the resources available to this farm. We first visited the farm’s museum, which documented the history of the farm’s development, including photos of North Korean farmers rebuilding after war, as well as photos of visits made by both Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il. I remember vividly a black and white photograph of Koreans, definitely taken over 50 years ago since most of the women and men were wearing traditional Korean attire. The image captures them celebrating the completion of a canal system for irrigation—the first one for the cooperative farm. There were numerous photos of Kim Il Sung giving advice to farmers in the fields and sitting casually with peasants, as well as farmers standing proudly alongside a row of new tractors. This farm was clearly beloved by Kim Il Sung and heavily invested in as a model farm. The farm was impressive. The primary crop grown was rice and for miles were tracts of lush green rice fields surrounded by a sophisticated irrigation system. Surrounding the rice fields were large subdivisions of housing, largely apartment building-looking structures. We stopped into a home that looked just as modern as one you would find in a South Korean farming village. In the front of our host’s home was a well-organized garden that grew vegetables, flowers and medicinal plants. Along the road were rows of trees and people on bicycles and the occasional oxen-pulled cart. We then stopped in an area of the farm where we were greeted by dozens of young farmers who looked hearty and healthy. They warmly welcomed us to a lunch they prepared in a large dining hall in a building with dorm rooms, showers and bathrooms, and classrooms. There is a thriving collective culture around singing in both North and South Korea, and after sitting down for a meal an accordion appeared and the North Korean farmers sang quite beautifully, much better I’m sorry to say than we did! I was really struck by how farmers and peasants in North Korea were so revered–as they should be–because of the role that they play in the society. The world over, farmers are treated so badly, laboring all their lives in the fields to grow food to feed us all, yet many of them never earn enough to feed their own families or learn to read. We ended our visit by harvesting cucumbers and planting bellflower with the young farmers. I looked around the farm with amazement at how well organized and manicured the farm appeared. They had a duck farm, large patches of vegetable gardens, greenhouses, and every spare inch of space was used for something, whether vegetables or fruit trees. As throughout the country, there were political posters and slogans to inspire their collective spirits and drive to work harder for the nation. When we were saying goodbye, it was a very emotional moment to know that unless reunification is realized, the possibility of our meeting again was slim. And who knows when that will be and what awful things could happen before then. On the long drive back from Sariwon, our guide Mr. Shin asked me what I thought about the fields and how the harvest looked as someone who studied agriculture. I could see that there were vegetable gardens everywhere–in the countryside as well as throughout Pyongyang–as well as side-croppings alongside vast tracts of rice paddies. I could see how organized they were to maximize food production. So I responded that it looked very good and productive, but in the back of my mind I thought to myself how vulnerable they must feel about the looming summer rains that could wipe out their entire harvest for the season. [Elich] North Korea has certainly had more than its share of agricultural misfortunes due to adverse weather. And with 80 percent of its territory being mountainous, the amount of land available for growing food is limited, making the nation’s food supply all the more vulnerable to weather patterns. Your delegation clearly connected with your hosts at the Migok collective farm on a personal level, even joining together in song. One of the difficulties in ascertaining the state of affairs in North Korea is that delegations tend to be taken to the same places and one wonders what the norm is for people living there. Yet because your delegation consisted of Korean-Americans and Korean-Canadians, I suspect that your group was able to connect on a much more personal level than is usually the case. You may have seen more than most groups do, and presumably your interactions were on a deeper level. Do you feel this was the case? [Ahn] Absolutely. I have now been to North Korea three times and although I have had the opportunity to revisit places that I have seen before, I’ve also had the privilege of visiting many new places. But I would venture to say that Koreans, whether from the United States, Canada, Brazil or elsewhere in the diaspora have a special place in the hearts of the people in North Korea. I think they view Koreans in the diaspora as members of a lost tribe who were forced to emigrate elsewhere because the country was not strong or united enough to ward off invasion or occupation. And for many of us who cannot speak our native language, it’s quite sad. Language is so vital to understanding one’s cultural and ancestral heritage, and it’s heart-breaking when you cannot communicate. I was born in Seoul and emigrated to the United States when I was three and as my parents were already pretty elderly and worked in L.A.’s Koreatown, they never learned English, which prevented them from assimilating into American society. Meanwhile, as I was assimilating into American society and speaking English only, I lost my ability to communicate with them beyond the most basics. This is tremendously sad, and I’m not alone. And I think the North Koreans see this and feel very empathetic towards us. On our trip was a young woman who is an elementary school teacher in the Bay Area. She was born Kay Fischer to an American father and a Korean mother, and she later changed the spelling to Kei. She grew up thinking she was half-Japanese until her mother confessed that she was actually Korean. Her mother, a second-generation Korean born and raised in Japan, explained that she withheld this knowledge because her father had avoided teaching her and her siblings Korean or about their Korean heritage. Kei’s mother explained to her that she had withheld this information because, like her father, she wanted to protect Kei in Japanese society, which heavily discriminated against Koreans. Kei explains that despite her grandfather’s efforts to protect her mother through assimilation into Japanese society, she still experienced the hardship because his experiences were so horrible. Furthermore, since we are a delegation of Korean Americans and Canadians who want to also contribute towards building peace between our newly adopted countries and our native homelands, I think they are trying to give us much history, access, and perspective. The DEEP program is not a tourist trip—it’s about building solidarity with the people of North Korea, to understand why they have built the society they have, and how our lives are so intertwined and influenced by the policies of our governments. We had the chance to visit with the students from the Pyongyang Architecture and Planning University. Many of the students spoke fluent English and they were incredibly bright and sharp. I have no doubt that they selected the best and the brightest to interact with us (as we do here in the United States, South Korea, and elsewhere). I remember one young woman, 23, who was studying architecture but also loved studying poetry and literature. She was so lovely, humble and gracious. We had the chance to have small group discussions and during our talk, one of my DEEP colleagues and I brought up the idea of creating a transnational campaign called “De-Mine the DMZ” to dismantle the 1.2 million land mines strewn across the DMZ. They loved the idea and said we must work towards making this happen. It’s not that I don’t think that non-Koreans don’t have the access that we do—I’m sure they do. Look at Selig Harrison who has been to North Korean umpteen times and has spoken directly with some of the DPRK’s top officials. But that’s not what we were there to do. We were there to connect with the people and as much as possible the youth of North Korea so that we can work together to build a permanent peace on the Korean peninsula and a reunification from the ground up. [Elich] That is a goal that many Koreans would support. I’ll return to this theme in a bit. But for now, I’d like to ask you about Pyongyang. I assume that you spent the bulk of your time in the capital. Tell us something about what you saw there. In particular, as this was your third trip to North Korea, I’m interested in what changes you’ve seen over time. [Ahn] Yes, we stayed at the Haebangsan Hotel in Pyongyang. I had previously stayed at the Koryo Hotel (the country’s best) and the Bottongang (alongside the Bottong River), but this one seemed centrally located. As most of our days were filled with a jam-packed itinerary, it’s hard to capture what I saw, as so much of what we saw were monuments, museums and major buildings–but I’ll do my best to recall my quickly fading memory. I saw a relatively modern, industrialized city that lacked things that we see in most major cities around the world: cars, neon lights, and advertisements. Certainly there were cars and trucks, but for the most part the people of Pyongyang were walking and biking. Instead of ads featuring scantily clad women selling alcohol, fashion or cars, there were beautifully painted political posters throughout the city. Since they were in Korean and my Korean is not that advanced, there are some words I couldn’t interpret (especially as we sped by in our bus). There were some unforgettable posters. One is of a Korean man knocking out two Western-looking Uncle Sams wrapped in red, white and blue. I can’t recall the exact words, but it went something like, “Kick out the Americans and let’s reunify on our own terms!” Every morning several of us went jogging along the Tedong River. The trails were beautifully manicured, with no litter on the paths, and there was a serenity and calm to the city. We would run past people wearing modern, professional looking clothes. They didn’t look any different than Koreans in the south, except of course lacking the wild fashion and racy attire that younger people are now wearing there. In order to cross streets, we would walk downstairs and cross an underground passage that was dimly lit. It took a moment for your eyes to adjust to the dark, but the North Koreans were hardly phased. Bikes and masses of people passed each other with very little collision. It was pretty remarkable. Actually, these runs were some of my favorite moments in Pyongyang and actually made me fall in love with the city. There was a timeless, surreal feel about the city that was created by thick air from the humidity, the river lined with weeping willows, and the absence of a cacophony of cars. As my colleague so eloquently put it, “There’s nothing like an energy crisis to quiet a city.” Of course as visitors it’s easy to appreciate the lack of cars or neon lights, but I have no doubt that the Koreans would wish that they could have access to consistent energy like the rest of the world. We visited several monuments and museums, such as the Juche Tower and the Revolutionary Martyr’s Cemetery, as well as popular destinations in Pyongyang such as the Okryukwa noodle house where we enjoyed a delicious bowl of nangmyun (noodles). We visited the maternity hospital in Pyongyang, which was quite impressive. They had very modern technology, very clean facilities, and what appeared to be a very organized and holistic system that enabled new mothers to heal and rest for several days following delivery. We also got to ride the famous Pyongyang subway. The stations were meticulously maintained, with ornately designed mosaic murals made with ceramic tiles. As we drove through the city, I do recall quite vividly our North Korean guides pointing to one restaurant, whose name evades my memory. They excitedly pointed out that that was the oldest restaurant in Pyongyang that had survived the bombs from the Korean War. As I look back on my time there, I realize why history is so important to North Koreans. History is so important because it explains why they chose the society that they chose to build and because there is virtually very little that remains from the past since so much of what existed had been destroyed before the Japanese fled at the end of WWII and during the Korean War. For example, when you go and visit the museums in North Korea, many of the items on display are replicas of artifacts. In fact, there are virtually few pieces of celadon pottery on display, whereas you can see celadon in museums in Asian Art museums in the United States, in South Korea and Japan. But it hardly exists in North Korea, probably because most of it was taken by the Japanese during the occupation and by wealthy Koreans who fled south, while what remained was destroyed during the war. And so that’s what you see in North Korea. A society that they had largely built by themselves after being completely destroyed during the Korean War. [Elich] We’ll never know the extent of artistic riches that were lost. I was aware of the removal of artwork during the period of Japanese colonial rule. But I hadn’t really dwelled on the thought that one of the results of the war, when U.S. bombers obliterated every town and city in North Korea, would be the destruction of most of what remained of the region’s artistic legacy. You were there at an interesting historical moment, when there seemed to be real progress on the nuclear agreement and the prospect of better relations. What did your hosts have to say about the nuclear agreement and U.S.-DPRK relations? How did they perceive the future? And finally, you’ve mentioned that DEEP intends to play a direct role in improving relations and building reunification. Perhaps it’s a bit unfair to ask this so soon after your trip, but are there plans in place for new activities by DEEP? What directions would you like to see the organization take? [Ahn] As much as I wished that the North Koreans had a more upbeat response when I asked them what they thought about the potential lifting of sanctions once the 40 days passed, they didn’t. Their typical response was, “We will just wait and see. We never pin much hope on the United States, especially the Bush administration. We fulfilled our end of the deal and all we can hope is that the United States keeps their promise.” During the ride back from Kaesong, I spoke at length with one of our guides. He gave a very thorough analysis of the nuclear “crisis,” tying together the collapse of the socialist trading bloc, North Korea’s need for energy in the absence of imported subsidized oil from the former Soviet Union (and therefore pursuit of nuclear energy), and the food crisis. He knew well that the Clinton administration never intended to build the light-water reactors–or if they did they were constrained by the Republican hawks who took over Congress–and that when the clock was running out to fulfill the U.S.’ end of the agreement, the Bush administration needed some way out. Hence the birth of the nuclear crisis. But I do think that they are somewhat hopeful about the change in direction that an Obama presidency could bring to North Korea and the rest of the world. Like the rest of us, they see how dangerous the Bush administration is and has been to global peace and security. As for DEEP, I can only speak for the work that I am involved with right now outside of the program. DEEP is a program out of New York’s community-based Nodutdol for Korean Community Development, and I know that they will continue to run the DEEP program as long as it’s needed. But as a fellow with the Korea Policy Institute, we are organizing a conference with UC Berkeley’s International and Area Studies Program called “Reunification: Building Permanent Peace in Korea.” The conference is intended to generate pragmatic U.S. policy options toward the Korean peninsula in the post-Bush administration era. Our focus is on building an enduring peace between the U.S. and North Korea that leads to the eventual unification of the Koreas. While our focus is on Korean unification and U.S. policy toward Korea, we realize that analysis of the Korean situation requires contextualization within a larger geopolitical framework that involves regional actors, governments, and peoples. There are multipolar and transnational politics that influence Korea. And so we are hoping to examine how U.S. strategic interests in Northeast Asia influence its policy positions toward the Koreas—that is to say, how the global shift of economic and military dominance from the western to the eastern hemisphere influences U.S. policy toward Korea. We’ve managed to bring together some of the leading historians and policy experts on Korea, including Bruce Cumings and Selig Harrison, so it should bear some rich discussion and insight to help shape a new U.S. Korea policy. Another area that I am working to support is the transition to sustainable agriculture in North Korea. I am specifically working with a seed scientist named Dr. Pilju Kim Joo who has been working with several cooperative farms since 1987. She is doing her best to help these farms stabilize following the devastating collapse of North Korea’s economy and agricultural production system, and she realizes that North Korea’s future lies in its ability to transition to more ecologically sustainable farming practices. So I am trying to help raise some funds to bring some of the farm managers, agricultural scientists and officials from the Ministry of Agriculture to take a tour of the larger-scale organic farms, especially those specializing in organic rice and cotton production. But it will take a long time for the North Koreans to reduce their dependency on the inputs that make farming expensive: pesticides, chemical fertilizers, and fuel–largely because they have been practicing this form of industrialized agriculture as far back as when the Japanese first introduced green revolution agriculture into Korea. But all of this will take some resources, so I’m hoping that some visionary philanthropist will be able to see the potential of such educational exchanges. And finally, it’s still a twinkle in my eye, but I’ve been conspiring with a colleague of mine, Dr. Christine Hong, to spark a transnational campaign called “De-Mine the DMZ.” As I’ve said over and over in this interview, we need a reunification that is not just led by corporations or the governments–but one that is led by the people and from the ground up. And it needs to be tangible and the first way to help Koreans travel freely from the south to north and from Pyongyang to Seoul is to remove the 1.2 million land-mines that are waiting to explode. We must not wait 20 years; we must do it today. KPI Fellow Christine Ahn writes and speaks frequently on hunger, trade and globalization, and Korea. A co-founder of KPI and Korean Americans for Fair Trade, she is also the editor of Shafted: Free Trade and America’s Working Poor and a contributor to the award-winning book The Revolution Will Not be Funded. Gregory Elich is on the Board of Directors of the Jasenovac Research Institute and on the Advisory Board of the Korea Truth Commission. He is the author of “North Korea and the Supernote Enigma” as well as the book Strange Liberators: Militarism, Mayhem, and the Pursuit of Profit.

On February 26, 2008, the New York Philharmonic made history as the first American orchestra to ever perform in North Korea. The Philharmonic chose their own musical repertoire and played in the East Pyongyang Grand Theater where the hosts constructed a brand new acoustic soundshell as requested by their guests. The North Korean government broadcast the concert live with no accompanying political commentary. International news media, many of which were on hand to witness the events, declared it a historical moment and a sign of détente between two governments whose animosities have endured since the founding of the DPRK. As the last divided nation to persist beyond the Cold War, Korea remains a symbol of a larger political and ideological struggle. As such, this concert resonated throughout the world, leaving behind echoes that will likely be interpreted and re-interpreted for years to come. Initiated through the bilateral exchange stipulation (Item II.1) of the October 3rd, 2007 agreement of the Six-Party Talks, on the U.S. side the visit was intended to help establish positive conditions for the eventual negotiated denuclearization of North Korea. The State Department was heavily involved with the Philharmonic’s visit, with Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill (Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs) the driving political force behind a cultural exchange that was a cause of chagrin for the neoconservatives who have opposed any meaningful negotiations with the DPRK. Perhaps this is why Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice sought to downplay the significance of the event, saying that “the North Korean regime is still the North Korean regime…I don’t think we should get carried away with what listening to Indeed, much will be lost if we evaluate the Phil’s visit solely in terms of its impact on an eventual denuclearization of North Korea. There are many unprecedented political, personal and musical gestures that were set in motion by the Philharmonic’s visit, making this event nothing less than a historic milestone in US-DPRK relations. For example, the American national anthem was played alongside the North Korean anthem for the first time ever. The symbolic meaning of this extraordinary gesture was reinforced by the placement of the American and North Korean flags on opposite ends of the stage as beacons of friendship and not hostility. Broadcasted live, the event constituted a significant portrayal of Americans interacting with North Koreans in a normalized, positive manner that spoke to a potential future relationship and the power of music. The North Koreans clearly went out of their way to facilitate the visit by the Philharmonic. If their actions do not signify a “thaw” in relations, it certainly seems to suggest that North Korea is ready to act on its longstanding desire for increased engagement with the United States. I remember during my ten-day visit to North Korea last summer, I was surprised by their desire to open more windows into their culture and their willingness to engage with some aspects of Western culture. I was particularly astonished by the visibility of foreigners in Pyongyang and the higher-than-expected level of exposure to foreign languages, not to mention the remarkable English skills of our interpreters and guides. I was also struck by the open-heartedness of the people and the passion with which they sought to illuminate and humanize their society and people. This all came as a surprise knowing how limited North Koreans are in making contact with outsiders via phone, internet, mail correspondence, media and travel. In light of these restrictions, the face-to-face encounters that are made possible through visits like the Philharmonic’s are that much more precious and significant, both in terms of impacting North Korean perceptions of Americans as well as American perceptions of North Koreans. Much has already been written about the eye-opening experiences of the Philharmonic musicians, with those of Korean descent getting particular media attention from the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other major media outlets. Some members of the NY Phil, such as violist Dawn Hannay, have provided their own unflinching accounts on personal blogs. As varied as their stories are, they tend to share a narrative trajectory of initial trepidation and inner conflict giving way to intense feelings of sympathy, understanding, or, at the very least, tempered ambiguity. One thing is certain: most NY Philharmonic members expressed being profoundly moved at some point during the exchange. I wish that more Americans could have this type of opportunity to experience North Korean people and culture more directly; I have no doubt that this would lead to judgments that, at the very least, would be more nuanced than what the mainstream media normally affords us. In the absence of regular direct contact, we must seek out different and creative means to engage in genuine exchange with the North Koreans, and this is where the visit, I believe, accomplished a great deal. As the conductor and spokesperson of the New York Philharmonic, Maestro Lorin Maazel asserted that “music is a powerful language in which those of us who are humane and intelligent, can speak to each other.” Given this, what kinds of stories can be summoned from this musical exchange? What can we read from the choice of repertoire that was performed in Pyongyang? From the North Korean perspective, I believe that much can be read from looking at whom they chose to invite as part their commitment to increasing bilateral exchange. In terms of the New York Philharmonic implicitly and explicitly representing the United States, an entire book could no doubt be written on the musical repertoire that they chose for a concert they knew would be broadcast not only in North Korea, but really, all over the world. Reflexive critics of North Korea have suggested that the government’s invitation to America’s oldest and perhaps most prestigious symphony to play in Pyongyang was driven merely by their desire to maximize bilateral musical exchange as a propaganda coup. (Had the North Koreans invited a less prestigious orchestra, I wonder if these same critics would have argued that the North Koreans intentionally sought to diminish American musical talent in the eyes of the North Korean citizenry.) I believe, however, that observers and critics have missed a critical element of the North Korean choice—namely that the symphony is a musical format in which the North Korean government has been profoundly invested in for quite some time. North Korean orchestras may look and sound a little different from American orchestras, but there is no doubt that they share a remarkably similar format. Musically speaking, the organizational format of the symphony is one that resonates with both Americans and North Koreans, constituting a paradoxical common ground between the two countries. In the music world, the orchestra is the most hierarchical and, if one wanted to get political, “totalitarian” of institutions. Supreme power rests with the conductor and this power is unquestioned directly by any of the musicians, except for perhaps a guest soloist whose own fortune is not bound to the orchestra’s. Within each section, all of the players are ranked by chair. The first violinist also holds the title of concertmaster and is responsible for supervising the tuning of the orchestra, coordinating the bowing of the strings, serving as a liaison between the conductor and the orchestra and providing secondary leadership. In this sense, the orchestra hardly sounds like an institution that represents the “free world.” And yet, paradoxically, it does. As any serious member of an orchestra would tell you, the only way to collectively realize certain aesthetic ideals on such a large-scale is to militantly and with precision follow the structure and processes laid out. In this sense, the orchestra is a microcosm of the structure and processes of North Korean life laid out in order to collectively realize socialist ideals. My point is not, of course, to suggest that orchestras are totalitarian and that we should banish them, but instead, to suggest that the enduring popularity and brilliance of the symphonic institution is living proof that paradoxes and contradictions about freedom, individuality, and collectivity are deeply embedded in many societies, even in the so-called “free world.” As the leading maestro of the Philharmonic, Maazel could not have been unaware of the potential ideological conflict between his roles as all-powerful conductor and representative of American egalitarianism. This may explain why he chose to momentarily subvert his own power by selecting Leonard Bernstein’s exhilarating “Overture” to Candide as an encore—a piece in which he dramatically steps down from conducting—allowing the orchestra to proceed unfettered to an audience holding their breath in anticipation. Although he explained his decision to step down as a tribute to the spirit of Bernstein, the legendary composer and conductor of the New York Philharmonic, some critics have interpreted this gesture as a thinly veiled suggestion to North Korea’s head of state, Kim Jong-il, that he consider stepping down as well. This interpretation ignores, of course, what happens next. Does this mean that the members of the symphony can now have a say in electing a new conductor? No. Does Maazel return to the perch from which he voluntarily and temporarily stepped down? Yes, of course, in the very next piece. In short, the critic’s reading of Maazel’s gesture as invitation breaks down almost immediately. Indeed, choosing to read Maazel’s gesture as an invitation to Kim to step down ignores what the symphonic world well knows—that “totalitarian” structures exist and even thrive in some of our most hallowed of cultural institutions. In sum, if the aim of North Korea was to emphasize common ground, there is perhaps no better choice than the orchestra, which may explain why symphonic exchanges between countries on opposite sides of the “Iron Curtain” have been so effective in the past. On the American end, the New York Philharmonic was given a momentous opportunity to communicate a message through their choice of musical repertoire and accompanying gestures—a message that will inevitably be read for all of its political, cultural, and historic implications. A single performance of a musical program by any given world-class symphony rarely bears this kind of interpretive gravity. At first glance, the program bears some resemblance to what one might encounter at a typical summer “pops” concert, with the exception of the Korean pieces: Aegukka ( (Encores) Farandole, Second L’Arlesienne Suite, Georges Bizet (1838-1875) Overture to Candide, Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990) Arirang (Korean folksong) In preliminary discussions between President and Executive Director Zarin Mehta and the State Department officials involved in negotiating the cultural exchange, some of the main goals in selecting the repertoire that emerged were: 1) to introduce North Korea to works that they would not have heard before and; 2) to present works that were either about “America” or by American composers. Both of these goals are cleverly reflected in the Knowing about these “behind-the-scenes” goals from the American perspective of the negotiations does provide some insight into the repertoire. However, taking into consideration the order and entirety of the program (including the encores), a startlingly daring message starts to take shape-one that begins with a clearly demarcated notion of nationhood (as represented in the anthems), giving way to pieces that accentuate the vitality of the “West” and “America” but also work to unravel the fabric of their definition, and ending with a surprise demonstration of empathy for Korea’s longing for union in the final encore of “Arirang.” Interestingly, the “shape” of this narrative can be seen as echoing the rhetorical structure of sijo, a spare form of poetry distinctive to Korea. Sijo typically consists of three lines of text: the first line introduces the main theme (in this case, the United States in relation to the DPRK), the second develops this theme, and the third has the added challenge of introducing a “twist” or “counter theme” while also providing a resolution to the poem. In this subtle fashion, the New York Philharmonic (perhaps unwittingly) created another level of resonance by tapping into an underlying aesthetic format familiar to most Koreans. When the New York Philharmonic goes on tour, it is customary for them to play the anthems of both countries. But given the historic nature of this event, this gesture was anything but customary. Instead, it was a profound recognition of the nationhood of the DPRK and a musical acknowledgment of a change in relations – albeit in a language established by the Western world. Rooted in the culture of military marching bands, anthems go hand-in-hand with histories of colonialism, imperialism and the concomitant adoption of Western notions of modernity and nationalism. To subscribe to the culture of national anthems is to open the door to a process of gaining legitimacy and recognition through a mastery of things Western: whether it be music, systems of governance, philosophies or Olympic sports. Given their philosophy of juche or self-reliance, it is no wonder that the DPRK has been reluctant to play into this kind of “game,” which may explain why, as far as patriotic songs go, the official anthem of Aegukka in the DPRK does not obviously engender as much emotional weight as the Star-Spangled Banner for Americans. Even so, I was astonished to see so many of the New York Philharmonic members standing up during the playing of both anthems. As in the opening scene of a drama, the anthems deftly served to introduce “characters” drawn with distinct national identities and boundaries, going a long way in establishing a tone of mutual respect and recognition pivotal to the deepening of any relationship. Following the anthems, the first piece of the program is the Prelude to Act III of Wagner’s Lohengrin. Within the context of the opera, the Prelude opens right after a hasty wedding has taken place between a maiden in distress (Elsa) and a mysterious knight (Lohengrin). Because Lohengrin must withhold his true identity as the Knight of the Holy Grail and son of King Parsifal, their love depends precariously upon trust. Although I do not advocate drawing strict parallels here, I do think that this parable on the fragility of trust between two figures caught in a maelstrom of larger forces is strangely relevant in understanding the past, present and future of US-DPRK relations. The next series of pieces on the program proceed more directly in addressing the subject of “America.” Whereas the Star-Spangled Banner presents a clearly demarcated, even defiant image of America, these pieces present an America that is porous, multi-ethnic, and enlivened by the transnational movements of immigrants and tourists: in other words, everything that the DPRK is not. Interestingly, the composers selected to “tell” the story of America are “outsiders” to varying extents; Antonín Perhaps because of his “outsider” status, Of all the pieces on the program, George Gershwin’s An American in Paris has the most to offer in terms of stirring something anew in the sonic sensibilities of North Koreans. With its prominently scored percussion, syncopated rhythms, seductive jazz melodies, and battery of honking car horns—all evoking the noise, dissonance and abundant richness of modern city life—An American in Paris beckons the listener to the lure of globalization, international travel, freedom, and the embrace of the “other” (whether this “other” be “Paris” as suggested in the title or African Americans as implied in the dominant jazz idiom). These are all qualities that North Koreans have been trained to be wary of, and yet the Gershwin was perhaps the first piece on the program to break through the stoic audience demeanor of the North Koreans, eliciting smiles throughout and robust applause at the end. In this sense, the Gershwin may be the most audacious piece of the program in terms of promoting modes of living that are extremely limited to North Koreans. Maestro Maazel raised the ante by cleverly suggesting that someone write “An American in Pyongyang” someday. However, the ultimate message of An American in Paris is not the celebration of getting lost in another’s culture; on the contrary, the message is that we can enjoy other cultures without losing a sense of one’s national identity. In bringing the “American” back “home” through a nostalgic interlude later in the piece, we realize that the experience of travel can also work to strengthen one’s sense of boundaries and ties to “home.” In the context of the DPRK, this piece seems to suggest that the “opening” of the country may not necessarily lead to the dissolution of one’s national identity; it may, in fact, induce nostalgia and strong forces for cultural preservation, as has been the case in South Korea. In response to the occasion, the New York Philharmonic gave three special “encores.” The first of these was Bizet’s Farandole from the Second L’Arlesienne Suite. The next encore was Leonard Bernstein’s Overture to Candide. Born to a Polish-Jewish family, Leonard Bernstein is another example of an American composer with an immigrant background featured on this program. In many ways, Bernstein is an obvious choice, given his legendary status as an earlier maestro of the New York Philharmonic. As mentioned before, Maazel did something very unexpected here; in a tribute to the spirit of Bernstein on what would have been his 90th birthday, Maazel chose to step down from the podium, allowing the orchestra to play as if guided by the disembodied spirit of Bernstein himself. With its interlocking soloistic passages, rapid tempos and use of irregular meters, this is definitely a collective feat of virtuosic proportions. Performing this piece in this fashion sets the stage for the final dramatic “twist” in the overall narrative of US-DPRK relations on a number of levels. For one, it suggests that progress may only be made if each side is willing to relinquish some power. From another angle, what better vehicle to provide this twist than a reference to Candide, a satire by Voltaire that critiques a particular brand of blind optimism or belief that “we live in the best of all possible worlds.” In many ways, the US and the DPRK are like mirror opposites, separated by an ideological divide where one nation’s utopia is the other’s dystopia. I cannot think of a more brilliant twist than this, subtly prodding us to view ourselves from the other side of the mirror. Looking at the sequence of pieces through the filter of the poetic sijo form — introduction, development, and twist-resolution — the final inclusion of Arirang makes for a very provocative conclusion. Of a handful of songs that are beloved on both sides of the DMZ, Arirang is unique in its ability to elicit feelings of heart wrenching loss. The lyrics describe being left by a lover crossing over the Arirang pass, most likely never to return. Although Arirang predates the Korean War, this longing for a departed loved one is often interpreted within the post-division context. In this sense, the simple yearning for one’s lover becomes synonymous with a longing for a nation that was once whole. Ultimately, the act of having America’s oldest orchestra play Arirang on North Korean soil is a testament to the US’s understanding of Korea’s tragic division. Closing with Arirang goes against the widely held North Korean belief that America opposes reunification. Despite all the symbolism associated with Arirang, this piece almost didn’t make it onto the program. In fact, its inclusion was suggested to Zarin Mehta (the executive director of the NY Philharmonic) by Yuri Kim, a Korean American state department employee who was present during preliminary discussions about the repertoire in October of 2007. It is worth nothing that the New York Philharmonic went so far as to perform a North Korean orchestral arrangement of Arirang, further demonstrating their commitment to cultural exchange and understanding. Although Arirang may not have been the symphonic showpiece of the program, it certainly was the evening’s showstopper. Firsthand accounts concur that murmuring in the audience could be heard as soon as the solo piccolo began to play the plaintive melody in its distinctive high register. Sounding as exposed and vulnerable as a performer balancing on a tightrope, the piccolo immediately set a tone of moody anticipation. As the piece developed, several of the audience members could be seen with tears in their eyes. As to be expected, Arirang was followed with warm applause. However, what was unusual was that this was accompanied with a very prolonged and emotional period of waving. Although it began with the performers waving to the audience, soon everyone was waving to each other as it became clear that no one wanted to say goodbye. North Koreans are well aware of the fact that their interactions with outsiders are fleeting at best. During my trip to North Korea last summer, saying goodbye to a group of people was always difficult. Even though we would often say our farewells with the popular song, “Let’s Meet Again” (Dashi Manapshida), it was always tinged with a poignant mixture of hope and sadness. Without Arirang, I am not sure whether the concert would have crossed over into this kind of emotional terrain. Given this, I believe it is important to acknowledge the role of people like Yuri Kim as well as the value and need for diverse perspectives factoring in proceedings of this historic nature. Although the lyrics of Arirang do not go so far as to actualize the state of (re)union, its performance within this context is a powerful gesture in this direction. In this way, Arirang makes for a remarkably progressive and hopeful resolution to the theme of US-DPRK relations. Indeed, the entire performance and the New York Philharmonic’s choice of repertoire went beyond communicating a simple message of improved relations, and provided subtle cues as to how normalization might be achieved. The Philharmonic’s performance in Pyongyang also conveyed a strong current of possibility and hope where words and verbal negotiations often fall short. Returning to Maazel, not only is music a powerful language, it is unique in its ability to make the impossible seem possible. KPI Contributor Donna Lee Kwon received her Ph.D. in music/ethnomusicology from the University of California, Berkeley. She is an assistant professor of ethnomusicology at the University of Kentucky, an elected member of the Society for Ethnomusicology Council, and a Member-at-Large for the Association for Korean Music Research. A full bio can be read here.

Ha-Joon Chang has taught in the Faculty of Economics, University of Cambridge, since 1990. He has consulted for numerous international organizations, including the United Nations, the World Bank, and the Asian Development Bank. He has published eleven books, including Kicking Away the Ladder, winner of the 2003 Myrdal Prize. In 2005, Chang was awarded the Leontief Prize for Advancing the Frontiers of Economic Thought, whose previous recipients include Amartya Sen and John Kenneth Galbraith. Chang’s book, Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism, is among a number of prominent books that have been targeted by the South Korean military in a systematic effort at censorship. Thank you, Professor Chang, for agreeing to have an interview with the Korea Policy Institute. Your new book, Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism, is the most thorough and critical review of the myth of free trade and international development infusing both history and digestible economic analysis. Thank you for this important piece of scholarship. Thank you. Since Chalmers Johnson already provided a brilliant review of your book, we’d like to use this opportunity to take your analysis on free trade and get your perspective on the Korea-U.S. free trade agreement, which is now being considered in the National Assembly in South Korea and it’s soon to be in the United States Congress. Yes. My first question is, in your book, you argue that the neoliberal structural adjustment program pushed onto the Korea economy by the IMF actually worsened the economic situation of South Korea. After the financial crisis of 1997, South Korea is now pushing for a neoliberal trade agreement with various governments, including the United States. What is the relationship between the push for these trade agreements and IMF imposing a neoliberal policy? Yes, the IMF mainly works—although not exclusively—on things like macroeconomic management, monetary and fiscal policy, and the financial sector, but it is basically based on the same intellectual foundation as the free trade agreement. [The South Korean Government] basically wants to institutionalize all these policies that have been used in Korea since the 1990s. It’s one thing to say that we have conservative macroeconomic policies and we welcome foreign investment, and another to sign this treaty, which will mean that when you step outside this boundary, you will actually get punished. So this [Free Trade Agreement] is a political project to consolidate this neoliberal regime in Korea. Your book makes clear that free trade agreements between wealthier developed countries and poorer developing countries cause great poverty and institutionalize global inequality. But what about free trade agreements between the most powerful countries, like the United States, and relatively developed nations like South Korea, are they any better? Yes, my view is that the free trade agreements between countries at similar levels of development tend to be beneficial because it provides bigger markets, greater competition, and so on. When you have free trade agreements between rich countries and poor countries, you have bad effects. But [free trade agreement] is completely wrong dominated by the fact that it basically stops economic development in its tracks. Once you open up to competition from the United States, Switzerland and so on, there’s no way you can develop better industries that will bring you higher income. Now then the practical question in Korea’s case is whether Korea is at a similar level of development with the United States. If that is the case, it might actually be beneficial, but what the people often don’t recognize is Koreans are, in this sense, full of themselves. They think “We are almost, not quite, but almost as rich as the United States and other rich countries,” but forget that their income levels are basically 1/3 of the U.S. level. Recently the dollar has been falling and so Koreans think they have become richer than they actually are in dollar terms, but if you look at all the indicators—the level of income, productivity and manufacturing—basically, Koreans are at about the 1/3 level of the countries like the U.S. and Switzerland. Given that gap, I very much doubt that this will be beneficial for Korea because although there might be some stimulation in terms of greater competition except in areas like automobiles, electronics, ship building where Korea already has international competitiveness, most industries would be wiped out. Advocates for the U.S.-Korea FTA argue that this agreement will improve competition between the farmers of both countries. This is also supported by the claim that South Korean farmers receive too much from government subsidies that unfairly protects them from competition from American farmers. Would this FTA lead to fair economic exchanges in the agricultural sector? The question is what do you mean by fair exchange, fair competition? Because when the players are unequal, equal treatment is unfair. My philosophy isn’t that good but I think it was Aristotle who said the most unequal treatment is the equal treatment of unequal people. And in the case of agricultural competition between Korean and U.S. farmers, this is definitely the case because the two countries have very different agricultural conditions. In one country, you have vast tracts of land, highly mechanized, intensive chemicals, while in the other country you don’t have those kinds of conditions. However hard the Korean farmers try, they’ll never be able to compete with American farmers. And in that case, is it really fair to let them have free competition when they have fundamentally different conditions? Leaping off that question, what about the claim that it’s natural that as South Korea industrializes and shifts to more of an information technology economy, that it’s inevitable for farmers to disappear. I accept that over time Korea will need to reduce its agriculture but the question is whether you want to do it in a shock therapy way. If this agreement is signed then more or less 3 million Korean farmers will be on a retirement plan in the next couple years. Secondly, you cannot treat agriculture in the same way you treat the manufacturing of iPods and things like that because agriculture is closely integrated to the way our land is organized, it has deep implications for environmental protection and like it or not, the whole of our country. Yes, I mean, in theory, there’s no God-given reason why we shouldn’t shut down all the farms, lay the countryside to waste and bring everyone into the city and give the farmers a fat pension. It might even be at one level fair treatment that the farmers get fully compensated, but agriculture’s something more than that. South Korean public health advocates argue that the Korea FTA will potentially wipe out South Korea’s universal health care system, because it will force the South Korean government to include new medicine produced by U.S. pharmaceuticals in their reimbursements. The pro-FTA pharmaceutical lobbyists argue that the passage of the FTA will enable Koreans to have access to cutting edge technology and encourage research that will save lives. Who is right? Well, in abstract, both are right, because patents have this two-side effect, a double-edged sword. So yes, [FTAs] encourage innovation, but it also makes these life-saving drugs very expensive. Once again, you cannot treat life-saving drugs in the same way you treat potato chips or corn flakes. So there’s a big question as to the legitimacy of patents in the international debate about the role of HIV drugs. After all, the patent is a socially sanctioned monopoly. If the government wouldn’t protect patents, the pharmaceutical companies would not have much profit. Now given that they have a social duty to deliver certain kinds of basic services to the society, the pharmaceutical industry’s argument is that they’re self-serving. They only highlight the good side. Of course, it can stimulate innovation as long as they require the fact that the huge profit that they’re making won’t simply be there without patents. So you need to give something back to society. I once read that in a newspaper interview a pharmaceutical executive complaining, “Why are you asking us to solve health crisis in Africa?” I think they have a lot more duty to the society than companies producing chocolate and breakfast cereal because these companies would not exist if we didn’t sanction artificially monopoly on patents. And in the case of the Korea-US FTA, we will basically have to accept the American medical system, which is laggard by international standards. This country spends the highest amount of its income on healthcare and it has one of the lowest health standards in the developed world. The Swedish spend only about ten percent of their income on healthcare and they’re much healthier and they live longer than the Americans. There’s something wrong with the system here and Americans are trying to import that. There’s been speculation that what’s really driving the free trade agreement is the push to privatize South Korea’s financial services. Can you talk about this and how it will affect ordinary working people? Well, I think that there are lots of different motivations behind this agreement. Some Korean manufacturing companies want reductions in two to three percent of U.S. tariffs so that they can sell a bit more, while there are others who are looking more into the financial sector. Yes, I think that there has been a push from the U.S. financial community and also some people in the Korean financial community. We have a number of financial institutions that have been nationalized after the Asian financial crisis because the government didn’t have to inject public money into them. Yes, these guys want these institutions to be privatized so that they can get a piece of action. Unfortunately, we have already seen the negative intentions of this market-driven, American-style financial system in Korea. Several banks have been basically bought up by foreign, mainly American, shareholders, and the way they run the banks has meant the reduction in the quality of services. In the old days, from one point of view, it’s over-manning, but when you went to the bank you immediately got service. Now you have to wait for so long because, like the American way, they under-man the place. The banks have also been lending mainly to households, both secure and un-secure, and not lending to enterprises. This may look good for ordinary people in the short term but in the long run, it hurts them because this means that there are less jobs created, less opportunities for them. So in the short run they may need temporary help with their finances but the whole system has been actually doing a great disservice to the ordinary people because it’s slowing down the economy and reducing economic opportunities. In the United States, there’s a fierce debate going on about the merits of free trade for ordinary American workers. Who would be the principal America-based winners and losers should this free trade agreement be ratified? Well, the losers would be mainly the auto producers and others like electronics and ships but frankly, there’s not much of those left in the U.S. anymore so the main losers will be the auto sector. And the main gainers will be the agribusiness and the financial industry as well as the main branches of the manufacturing of pharmaceuticals. There will be some people who would be very hard-hit by this agreement, and unfortunately this country doesn’t have adequate compensation mechanisms for this kind of thing. In Europe, free trade is less of an issue because they have a good welfare state. So even if you sign this agreement and autoworkers lose their jobs, they don’t have to worry about this healthcare. They don’t have to worry about their children’s schooling because that minimum standard of living is guaranteed and he will be able to get retrained through state subsidies. In those countries, even though there are some people who have been hit by these kinds of agreements, it’s not the end of the world for them. But in the U.S. for some people, this will be literally the end of the world for them, because they lose their income, they lose their healthcare plan, what are they going to do? South Korean capital investment has had a significant impact in changing the landscape of the lives of people in U.S. cities such as Los Angeles and New York. I don’t know if you got a chance to see that while you’re in New York, you’ll see a lot of Korean shopping malls and definitely the presence of South Korean investment. Migration of labor from South Korea has been the same. You see quite an extensive working class in these cities. Should the FTA pass, how do you think it will influence the flow of capital investment and migrants from U.S. to South Korea? Well, in the first place, in relation to labor, South Korea has the same tools to secure any kind of guarantee about migration in this agreement. So countries like Australia was able to guarantee somewhere between 4000, 5000 working visas issued every year. And South Korea seemed to secure that, so I doubt this will change the migration flow a lot. In terms for capital investment, the only reason why the Korea-US FTA might increase Korean investment into the U.S. is through the so-called investor protection clause like Chapter 11 in NAFTA, which gives enormous leverage for the investors of the host government. But the question is whether the lack of it has really been preventing Koreans to invest in the U.S. side. Before the start of this new agreement, I’ve never heard any complaints along that line. Now, my final question is, if you had the chance to brief presidential candidate Obama’s trade ministers, what would you say, what would you tell them? Well, I think externally, the U.S. should stop promoting free trade among poor developing countries. There’s enough evidence, which now even the World Bank indirectly admits, to show that these policies have not worked for these countries and externally, they should, first of all, stop pushing these ideas. And secondly, they should stop pushing for bi-lateral free trade agreement with other countries because we have, despite its problems, a functioning multi-lateral system called the WTO. And all these bilateral free trade agreements are disrupting this mechanism. Despite its name “free trade agreement,” when its bi-lateral, it’s not a free trade agreement because if you are giving free market access to, say, American cars or chemicals, you are implicitly discriminating against German cars and Japanese chemicals. So actually, even if you believe in free trade, actually, if you are a true believer in free trade, you have to support this multilateral system. And this is why more intelligent free trade economists like Professor Bhagwati of Columbia are very critical of this bi-lateral free trade agreement because for them they are intelligent enough to know that this is not a free trade agreement. Secondly, that the new incoming government should stop pushing this bi-lateral agreement. And thirdly, internally this leads back to the point I made earlier, the U.S. should try to build up its welfare state if it’s really intent on pursuing free trade for itself. As I explained earlier, why are some Americans so opposed to free trade? They may not have all the economics to understand everything but they are intelligent enough to know that this is going to be the end of the world for them. If I were in their position, I would take to the streets and protest. In Europe, in contrast, you don’t see that kind of protest that much, although you have the famous French farmers, because people say, “I don’t want to lose my current job, but it’s not the end of the world.” So if the U.S. is actually going to pursue the free trade, which I think it should among rich countries, then it should reform its welfare system so that people don’t have to worry about these risks that open us inevitably. I put it in the following way, that sometimes you can drive a car 18 miles only because you have brakes. If you don’t have brakes, then probably even the most skillful driver will be able to drive only 13 miles. In the same way, people can actually be even more forward looking in making choices, they can be more risk-taking, they can be more innovative when they know that failure doesn’t mean you are being throw into the scrap heap of the future. So for that reason, if you want to pursue free trade, please revamp the welfare mechanism. Transcribed by Sarah D. Park

On June 10, one million South Koreans from all walks of life poured onto the streets of Seoul, the nation’s capital, to protest the newly elected President Lee Myung Bak’s deal with the United States to fully open Korean markets to U.S. beef. Despite widespread concerns over the safety of U.S. beef imports, Lee acted quickly to lift the partial ban on U.S. beef to pave the way for the passage of the U.S.-South Korea Free Trade Agreement (FTA). Lee knew that there would be no FTA unless Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-MT) got the green light for the U.S. beef industry to fully resume exports to South Korea, which banned U.S. beef in 2003 after the discovery of a cow with bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE). Protests began six weeks ago by high schools students and housewives concerned about the safety of U.S. beef appearing on their plates. It soon evolved into a massive campaign to bring down the Lee government. Anger against the deal quickly spread throughout the country, and within 40 days, the number of protesters grew from thousands to one million. “In the beginning it was about the beef,” says 29-year-old Park Kyung Kun of Seoul, “but now it’s about democracy. We want democracy back.” To the rest of the world, South Korean protests over the safety of U.S. beef are portrayed as an expression of simmering anti-Americanism. Without a doubt, anti-American sentiments have historical roots. But Koreans also have a legitimate claim to fear the safety of U.S. beef. Beef Recall Last year, some 200 million pounds of beef were recalled from the U.S. food supply. In just one recall, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) recalled 143 million pounds of meat from just one company alone, the Westland/Hallmark Meat Company. Meat from this slaughtering house has been distributed throughout the National School Lunch programs. And despite the recall, very little was returned because most of it had already been consumed. “Over the past few years, several hundred million pounds of U.S. beef have been recalled,” says Dr. Michael Greger of the Humane Society of the United States. “This is a staggering amount,” says Greger. “No wonder Koreans are concerned.” The USDA tests approximately one out of every 1,000 cows. In real numbers, only 40,000 cows are tested of the 37 million cows slaughtered annually. Meanwhile, Japan surveys every cow, Europe one in four, and Canada one out of 250. The USDA devotes just two percent of its overall $90 billion dollar budget and just two percent of its entire 100,000-person staff to “enhance protection and safety of the nation’s agriculture and food supply.” It’s no wonder why 65 countries, including the European Union, restrict U.S. beef imports. Since 2003, three cattle from the United States have been infected with mad cow disease. Given the fatality of mad cow disease, Americans would assume that the USDA is pushing for more testing of the beef industry. To the contrary, Congress hasn’t even passed a ban on eating downed animals. These are animals that are too sick or injured to even walk and are literally being dragged into the slaughterhouse. Rather, the USDA is prosecuting companies who want to conduct their own testing. In 2007, the USDA prosecuted Creekstone Farms for wanting to test with their own money every one of their own cattle for mad cow disease. They won the right to test in Federal Court, but in May 2008, the Bush administration reversed the court decision allowing the meatpacking company to market its products as BSE-free. Open Door Policy Another reason why South Koreans are so roiled is because the beef protocol will allow in nearly all forms of American beef into the Korean market and will weaken the controls the Korean government has traditionally used in case of suspected problems. The April 18, 2008 deal scraps the important qualification Lee’s predecessor Roh Moo Hyun included in the side deal it negotiated last year ensuring that imported beef must be free of “specified risk material” for BSE, such as bone fragments. South Korean Trade Minister Kim Jong-Hoon is now in Washington to renegotiate yet another voluntary regulation system. According to this protocol, U.S. beef companies would self-label the age of the cattle where the beef came from. But South Koreans have already seen how ineffective this voluntary system works. Last year, when South Korea partially lifted its ban to allow boneless beef and beef from cattle under aged 30 months, the first three shipments of U.S. beef to Korea contained bone fragments, including one shipment that contained an entire spine. The voluntary system still doesn’t address the “Specified Risk Materials” (SRMs) that are highly susceptible to BSE. Most Koreans eat 85 parts of the cow, compared with Americans who eat only about 10 parts. And Koreans eat parts of the cow that are highly susceptible to prions that huddle in certain areas of the brain, eyes, intestines, spinal cords and backbones-this is anatomical and scientific, not hysterical. By the time these prions invade our immune systems, humans are exposed to a fatal, neurodegenerative disease with no cure: Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. It riddles our brain with holes. And this isn’t something that one can just cook out of the meat, compared to most other food-borne pathogens. So it’s up to the meat industry to make it safe and the USDA to ensure that it doesn’t end up in our food supply and on our plates. In the end, it is up to Koreans to determine their own food safety standards. These are government regulations and policies, and therefore must be democratically decided. They should not imposed by another country, especially one that has such a questionable track record. Christine Ahn, a senior analyst for Foreign Policy In Focus, is a policy analyst with the Korea Policy Institute.

On April 11, the Center for Disease Control (CDC) released a report that found that of the national efforts to improve U.S. food safety, “none of the targets were reached in 2007.”1 According to the CDC, 76 million Americans — one in four — come down with food poisoning every year.2 Among the most common is E. coli, a byproduct of the system of industrialized animal agribusiness. Americans have a common perception that the problem stems from food coming from outside the country—from China, say, or Mexico. Instead, it’s our food that’s the problem. Instead of cleaning up its own act, the American meat industry has shifted responsibility to the consumer — not just in the United States, but also in countries where U.S. meat is exported. The United States is using bilateral trade agreements to arm-twist weaker countries into accepting its food safety standards as a tool to expand the market control of U.S. corporations. South Korea is the latest victim. In June 2007, the United States and South Korea signed a free trade agreement (FTA) that now awaits ratification in the ROK National Assembly and the U.S. Congress. A pre-condition for negotiations was a commitment from South Korea to lift its ban on U.S. beef, which had gone into effect in 2003 after the discovery of a U.S. calf with mad-cow disease. In order to get the FTA talks rolling, South Korea’s former president Roh Moo Hyun partially lifted the ban, allowing boneless beef and meat from cattle aged under 30 months to reach Korean markets. However, subsequent shipments of U.S. beef have been quarantined and returned for containing bone fragments, including a beef shipment last July that contained an entire spine. These discoveries in South Korea — coupled with more recent episodes such as a rat found last month in frozen vegetables imported into Korea from the United States and the release of a Humane Society video showing abuse of downer cows at a Westland/Hallmark Meat Co slaughtering house that resulted in the largest recall of beef in U.S. history — have reinforced concerns within the Korean public. This would normally spell trouble for the pro-FTA lobby since Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Montana) has said that he wouldn’t even entertain the FTA unless South Korea lifts its ban on U.S. beef. However, the U.S. meat industry, and its allies in the Bush administration, is lobbying Korea with all its might to lift the ban before week’s end.3 “There is a lot of pent-up interest in the market,” said Assistant U.S. Trade Representative Wendy Cutler of these U.S. beef corporations. Although the new conservative president, Lee Myung-bak, visits Washington this week to affirm South Korea’s commitment to the FTA and the U.S.-ROK military alliance, he may not have enough votes in the National Assembly to dismantle Korea’s domestic health laws to accommodate U.S. corporate interests. Beef in Context The U.S. beef industry’s battle against Korean consumers is part of a larger corporate food safety agenda advanced increasingly through bilateral channels. The strategy is codified in terms like “science-based,” “equivalence,” and “harmonization.” Powerful countries are using bilateral agreements to compel weaker countries into accepting their food safety standards and expand the market control of their own corporations. With Korea, the United States has been insisting that no free trade deal is possible unless Korea changes its food safety import regulations for beef, recognizes U.S. beef inspections as equivalent, and opens its market to cheap U.S. beef imports. Most Koreans are dead set against these U.S. demands: a recent poll found that 87% of Korean housewives believe American meat is “unsafe.”4 Koreans not only want to protect their local farmers, who will, with the implementation of the FTA, face competition from tariff-free subsidized U.S. beef imports. They are also justifiably concerned about the safety of U.S. meat, especially when it comes to BSE or Mad Cow Disease. Korea, like many other countries, enacted a complete ban on U.S. beef when a case of BSE was detected in the United States in 2003. Ever since, the United States has pushed hard to regain valuable beef export markets in Korea and elsewhere through a twin process of defining its own BSE inspection system and getting the rest of the world to accept this system as safe. Not being able to convince authorities in key markets like Japan and Korea about the merits of its BSE control efforts, the United States has looked for leverage elsewhere, mainly with the World Organization for Animal Health (OIE), the international standard setting body for animal health recognized by the WTO. The U.S. strategy at the OIE has been to change the guidelines covering trade from countries with BSE so that a country’s status is based not on the presence of BSE but on a “scientific risk assessment” of the safeguards that a country adopts to keep BSE out of exports. The United States moved this process along in 2003 by creating a new status of “minimal risk” for countries exporting to the United States.5 It then successfully pushed for a resolution at the OIE in 2005, which was adopted in 2006, where the five original categories for classifying a country were reduced to three and modified into the new categories of “negligible BSE risk,” “controlled BSE risk,” and “undetermined BSE risk.” Moreover, where the OIE previously only ruled on a country’s claim to be BSE-free, now the OIE could rule on whether a country should be considered a “controlled risk,” greatly facilitating that country’s ability to export.6 At its May 2007 General Session in Paris, with Korean protestors outside in the streets, the OIE issued its first list of “controlled risk” counties, with the United States not surprisingly making the cut.7 The United States immediately used this ruling from the OIE to push hard for the opening of markets to U.S. beef. “We will use this international validation to urge our trading partners to reopen export markets to the full spectrum of U.S. cattle and beef products,” said Mike Johanns, U.S. secretary of agriculture. “We will use every means available to us to ensure that countries rapidly take steps to align their requirements with international standards.”8 Although the OIE ruling in no way forced it to change its regulations, Korea faced the added pressure of the FTA negotiations. It ultimately reopened its markets with the proviso, well within OIE guidelines, that the beef be free of specified risk material, such as bone fragments. When Korean authorities detected such bone fragments in the first three shipments of U.S. beef (as well as trace levels of dioxin exceeding approved levels in the third shipment), they rejected the meat. Then, in June 2007, Korea decided to suspend all export permits to U.S. suppliers when two shipments of beef products originating from Cargill and Tyson were exported to Korea without the necessary quarantine certificates.9 Rather than deal with the problem, U.S. beef corporations, backed by Washington, insist that Korea change its criteria on bone fragments and start letting U.S. beef in, bone fragments and all. Otherwise there would be no FTA. Beef and Free Trade Other countries have already signed away the right to block U.S. meat exports, not only for BSE concerns in beef but for a whole range of food safety and animal health concerns that afflict the U.S. meat industry. The U.S. meat industry has been very careful to insist that the FTAs cannot only deal with lowering tariffs; they have to also strip countries of their rights to define their own sanitary and phytosanitary (SPS) standards in order for U.S. meat to get guaranteed market access. The big U.S. poultry companies have been particularly ferocious in this regard. For these companies, exports are critical because, with domestic demand mainly for white meat, they generate an enormous and growing surplus of chicken leg quarters (dark meat).10 But most export markets refuse to take their chicken leg quarters because of food safety and animal health concerns, such as hormone and antibiotic residues, and because they undercut domestic producers with ridiculously low prices. So big U.S. poultry corporations like Tyson and Cargill look to the FTA processes as leverage to push open markets– by simultaneously reducing or eliminating tariffs and locking countries into U.S. food safety standards. The FTA with Morocco set an early precedent. The country drastically reduced tariffs and then agreed to accept export certificates from U.S. inspectors “as the means for certifying compliance with standards on hormones, antibiotics, and other residues” for beef and poultry.11 Subsequently, under a separate SPS agreement within its FTA with the United States, Panama agreed to recognize the equivalence of U.S. meat inspections and the U.S. beef grading system, to grant access to all U.S. beef exports consistent with OIE standards, and to lift its formerly strict import certification and licensing requirements.12 The CAFTA agreement, which is gradually opening Central American countries to tariff-free imports of chicken leg quarters from the United States, was another important victory for U.S. poultry corporations. Given the strong, politically-connected Central American poultry companies that had grown up under trade protections, the United States was particularly concerned that the openings on tariffs agreed to under the FTA would spark “a movement among Central American poultry producers to block entry of U.S. poultry and products through the use of sanitary technical barriers.”13 Most of the SPS complaints coming from the United States concerning poultry are not new. El Salvador, Honduras and Costa Rica have long-standing zero tolerance policies on Salmonella, which effectively prohibits imports of raw poultry from the United States, where Salmonella is rampant in the poultry industry.14 Honduras also has strict policies on avian influenza that have raised the ire of the U.S. poultry industry. U.S. complaints about these measures being “arbitrary” and not based on science have not had much traction though, given that these countries are self-sufficient in poultry production. But the FTA negotiations changed the dynamic. The United States used a parallel working group on SPS to “leverage the impetus of active trade negotiations to seek difficult changes to the countries’ SPS regimes.”15 By way of this working group, all the countries agreed to “recognize the equivalence of the U.S. food safety and inspection system – eliminating the need for plant-by-plant inspection.” The U.S.-Peru FTA was a particularly crushing win for corporate chicken. Sara Lilygren, vice president for federal government relations for Tyson Foods, called it “the best market access arrangements for poultry ever negotiated in a free trade agreement.”16 Tyson and other U.S. poultry corporations won immediate and expanding tariff-free market access for chicken leg quarters and a specific commitment from Peru to recognize both the U.S. system for determining disease status and the U.S. inspection system for poultry slaughter and processing facilities. “In the past, U.S. poultry exports to Peru have been blocked by Peruvian regulators on grounds that the U.S. product allegedly posed a threat of avian influenza and Newcastle disease or even Salmonella,” said Tyson’s Lilygren. “Hopefully, the commitments that Peru has now made to respect decisions of U.S. animal health regulators will ensure that the U.S. industry will benefit immediately from the market access provisions of the agreement and will not have those benefits blocked by the imposition of non-tariffs barriers in the form of dubious SPS requirements.” As a result, Peru and other countries that have signed similar agreements will have to accept the dumping of poor-quality U.S. meat into their markets. The impacts will be immediate and brutal for local industries, especially for the small producers. A few local companies may survive, by consolidating and expanding their operations internationally, such as the Multi Inversiones poultry group of Guatemala, which has expanded into neighboring countries and Brazil. While FTAs may conceivably give local poultry producers some access to U.S. markets, in practice the U.S. inspection system tends to block out all but the biggest. Only three poultry plants are certified for export to the U.S. in Chile, two in Costa Rica, and zero in El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, and Morocco. Poultry plants in Mexico, a large poultry producer sitting next door to the U.S. market, can only get approval to export processed poultry products slaughtered under federal inspection in the United States.17 Meanwhile, the big U.S. poultry companies are following-up on this new market access by buying up local producers and directly integrating them into their transnational production chains, as Cargill has recently done with the take over of two important poultry companies in Honduras and Nicaragua.18 GM Food, Too The Bush administration’s attack on Korea’s food safety standards through the FTA was not limited to beef. In a reported swap for Seoul easing its rules of origin for U.S. textile exports, Korea agreed to lower its domestic biosafety standards. The deal, signed on the sidelines of the final round of U.S.-Korea FTA negotiations in late March 2007, is called the U.S.-Korea “Memorandum of Understanding on Agricultural Biotechnology.” Immediately hailed as a great breakthrough by the Washington-based Biotechnology Industry Organization, the agreement took Koreans by surprise, generating angry reactions in the formal political arena, in the mass media, and on the streets.19 The U.S.-Korea ag-biotech agreement obliges Korea to restrict its risk assessment of imported GM products for food, feed, or processing to their “intended” use. In other words, if local farmers sow GM maize kernels from the United States that were meant for cooking, the U.S. companies responsible for the transfer of the kernels are free of any liability. This is precisely how Mexico’s indigenous maize crop got contaminated. The agreement also commits Korea to act on its GM labeling laws in a “predictable” manner. This common aspect of most U.S. FTAs, which goes under the misleading label of “transparency,” in fact grants Washington the right to meddle in policy decisions in Seoul. Finally, Korea’s implementation of the UN Biosafety Protocol, which the United States refuses to sign, is bound to the terms of this bilateral agreement with Washington. In this case, as in other FTAs, the United States is exempt from the Protocol’s documentation requirements for the entry of GM crops. With the ink on the agreement barely dry, American GM crops began to penetrate Korea’s food supply. Until recently, Korean GM laws, particularly the rules on labeling, had essentially shut GM imports out of the country’s food supply, except for some use in animal feed, soybean oil, and soy sauce (the latter two products deemed exempt from mandatory labeling requirements because their production processes are said to remove the GM proteins). But in February 2008, less than a year after the signing of the ag-biotech agreement and just three months after Korea ratified and brought into force the Biosafety Protocol, the Korean Corn Processing Industry Association purchased 697,000 metric tons of U.S. GM maize for shipment between April-August 2008: the first major shipment of GM maize destined for food use to arrive in Korea since the adoption of the GM labeling law in 2000. Similarly, Korean approvals of GM imports have skyrocketed since the U.S. agreement. By January 10, 2008, there were 58 living modified organisms (LMOs) approved for import as feed or food into Korea. One month later, the number had nearly doubled: 102 approvals, 70% of them from U.S. firms (Monsanto, DuPont, and Dow). Korea is not the first country to cede its sovereign right to control biotech foods under pressure from U.S. corporations in bilateral negotiations. India and China both backed down from GM import restrictions after bilateral “discussions” with the United States.20 Thailand pulled back from strict GM labeling legislation in 2004 when the United States warned that the legislation would affect their FTA negotiations. More recently, U.S. corporations have called on the U.S. government to use the proposed FTA with Thailand to force it to start allowing field-testing of GMOs. The same goes for Malaysia, where U.S. corporations want the Malaysian government to back down from consideration of mandatory labeling of GM products as a prerequisite for the proposed U.S.-Malaysia FTA.22,23 Battle for Food Sovereignty The use of bilateral free trade agreements to rig food safety standards in favor of a rapidly concentrating global food industry is cause for concern — all the more so during a deepening world food crisis. To most people, food safety should have something to do with health, as well as cultural prerogatives. That agenda, however, has been hijacked. As tariffs and quotas are torn down under the mantra of trade liberalization, food safety is becoming a major offensive tool for industrial titans like the United States or Europe to not only get market access for exports but to reduce competition from imports (in the absence of tariff and quotas). Equivalence, which all WTO members are supposed to implement, between different countries’ food safety standards doesn’t mean harmonizing up to higher standards. It means equivalence with those of the more powerful country, which in the case of the U.S. means harmonizing down to the lowest common denominator. The U.S.-Korea FTA bears this out dramatically. Sad to say, food safety has become a bargaining chip in the struggle for corporate control. This raises an important challenge for the food sovereignty movement. Aside from some boycotts and recalls, real decision-making on food safety standards is not in the hands of ordinary people or even competent regulators. Instead, food safety is determined more and more in corporate boardrooms and trade negotiations. Perhaps the lessons being learned from different experiences fighting FTAs in different countries will lead to stronger campaigns to regain control over the issue of food safety within the larger battle for real food sovereignty. * Christine Ahn is a policy analyst with the Korea Policy Institute and a member of the Korean Americans for Fair Trade. GRAIN is an international non-governmental organization with 13 staff in nine countries spread across five continents to promote the sustainable management and use of agricultural biodiversity based on people’s control over genetic resources and local knowledge. GRAIN also collaborates with www.bilaterals.org and helped produce www.fightingftas.org.

On February 2, 2006, the United States and the Republic of Korea (South Korea) announced that they would open talks on a bilateral free trade agreement (FTA) between the two governments that would remove protective trade measures such as tariffs and import quotas. Annual U.S.-South Korean trade tops $74 billion, and the proposed FTA would be the largest for the U.S. since the controversial North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was passed in 1994. Despite the huge impact that this FTA would have on ordinary citizens in both countries, there has been very little American media attention to the talks. While members of Congress often speak of trade issues, until recently few have focused their attention on this specific FTA. Even the vocal opposition to the FTA of Democratic Presidential candidate John Edwards, recently joined by Hillary Clinton, has not drawn significant attention to the FTA. When FTA negotiations formally opened in June 2006, pro-FTA interests in the U.S. and South Korea’s chaebol pressed their respective government officials to come to a quick agreement in order to take advantage of “fast-track” authority afforded by the Trade Act of 2002. Fast-track allows the President to negotiate international trade agreements and submit them to Congress for a mandatory vote without possibility of amendment. This authority expires on July 1, 2007. Because fast-track requires that Congress be given at least 90 days to examine any agreement reached by negotiators behind closed doors, the effective deadline for coming to an agreement was April 2, 2007. Not coincidentally, the two sides announced on April 2 that they had come to an agreement resulting in tariff reductions on approximately 90 percent of all imported industrial and agriculture products, covering areas including but not limited to automobiles, competition policy, e-commerce, transparency, pharmaceuticals/medical devices, intellectual property rights (IPR), investment, and services. However, it has become increasingly clear that negotiators did not have a complete deal in place before the deadline. Instead, they rushed to sign what amounted to an incomplete agreement amidst mass protest in South Korea in an effort to ensure that the FTA would be considered under fast-track. The U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) continues to state that significant aspects of the FTA will have to be renegotiated in order to get through Congress. That actual negotiations are taking longer is not surprising given that South Korea’s FTA with Chile, despite significantly lower trade volume, took three years to negotiate, yet South Korean and U.S. negotiators attempted to rush through a deal in less than 10 months. The text of the FTA was released on May 24—almost eight weeks after the deal was announced—and Congress will not have the opportunity to undergo the mandated 90-day review period before fast-track expires at the end of June. Thus far, the April 2 announcement has provided sufficient political cover for USTR’s assertion that the FTA should be considered under fast-track. Fast-track is inherently a closed process, designed to cut the voices of our Congressional representatives out of the mix. The limited public discourse in the U.S. about its trade policy is reflective of this antidemocratic approach toward trade policy, and unfortunately the 2006 election of the Democratic Congressional majority may not result in a fundamental change. On May 10, a handful of leading Democrats announced a deal with the Bush Administration that likely ensures the passage of FTAs with Peru and Panama, may become a template for the South Korea and Columbia FTAs, and potentially extends fast-track authority beyond July 1. Not a single labor union, environmental or public interest organization, or consumer rights advocate was consulted on this deal, and even the Democratic Caucus was not informed much less consulted about the deal until it was already in place. Proponents of the deal have suggested that it requires FTAs to have provisions protecting labor and environmental standards, but unlike legal rights already given to multinational corporations, there are no guarantees that trade unions and environmental protection groups would be able to enforce these standards in international courts. Not surprisingly, early estimates suggest that a very large majority of Democrats will be voting against the deal. In South Korea, FTA negotiations have unfortunately been marked by a return to the authoritarian practices of past dictatorships. In March of 2006, some 270 civic organizations representing millions of workers, farmers, intellectuals, artists, and citizens announced the formation of the Korean Alliance Against the Kor-US FTA (KoA). In response to KoA and South Korean labor union efforts, police issued summons and warrants for more than 170 social movement leaders, raided local offices of civic organizations, detained leaders of farmers and workers organizations and even made threatening phone calls to potential participants of public rallies. Tens of thousands of police officers were deployed on major roads leading to Seoul to prevent workers and farmers from exercising their freedom of assembly and travel. South Korea’s National Human Rights Commission has suggested that the government’s tactics are inconsistent with the South Korean Constitution, but this did not stop the administration of former labor lawyer-turned-President Roh Moo Hyun from outlawing public demonstrations opposing the agreement and blocking anti-FTA advertising from appearing on television while simultaneously airing pro-FTA government commercials. The attempt to control public debate has driven the widespread sense that the government illegitimately locked farmers and civic organizations out of the democratic process. Polling in late March saw 83 percent of the South Korean public voicing opposition to having the Roh administration concluding the trade agreement, favoring instead having the next South Korean government negotiate any accord. Historical Relations of Trade South Korean public engagement with the FTA has been ubiquitous since negotiations began, and important sectors of South Korean civil society mobilized early and often to bring attention to the FTA. The Korean peninsula’s intense focus on trade relations with the U.S. has deep roots, and South Koreans are more likely than Americans to have some familiarity with the historical relations of trade between the U.S. and Korea. In 1866, the heavily-armed gunship General Sherman entered Korean waters in an effort to negotiate trade relations. There without permission, the ship declined to turn back after being told it was unwelcome. Accounts differ as to who fired first, but in the end the ship was burned down and the mercenary crew was killed. This led, five years later, to the first explicit U.S. military incursion into Korea when the U.S. government, determined to force Korea into trade relations, sent ships and Marines to demonstrate both U.S. intentions and strength, leading to the deaths of several hundred Koreans. Inequality between the two nations was formalized through the 1882 Treaty of Chemulpo, negotiated not by the U.S. and Korea, but by the U.S. and China. The U.S. acquired extraterritorial rights, consular representation, fixed tariffs, and port concessions in Korea while China maintained Korea as a geographic buffer. Koreans received no material benefits from the agreement, but understood the treaty as obliging the U.S. to protect what was left of Korean sovereignty from encroachment by other nations. This impression was dashed in 1905 when the U.S. and Japan signed the secret Taft-Katsura Agreement that ensured American noninterference in the Japanese colonization of Korea, and Japanese noninterference in the U.S. colonization of the Philippines. The total loss of Korean sovereignty was formalized in 1910 by Japan’s annexation of Korea, and effectively rendered trade relations between Korea and the U.S. as relegated and mediated by America’s relationship with Japan. U.S. trade with Korea per se was thus a non-issue until after the hot phase of the Korean War ended in a military armistice, after which Korea was divided. The U.S. positioned the southern half of the peninsula as a buffer for its interests in developing post-World War II Japan. The U.S. decision to base much of the industrial support of the Korean War in Japan helped propel Japan’s economic rise; even as the Korean peninsula was being laid to ashes, Japanese industry developed rapidly in order to service U.S. forces. (South Korea’s economy received a similar jumpstart from the destruction of Vietnam.) It was not until the early 1960s that U.S. economic policy toward South Korea began to emphasize developing the South Korean economy through the extraction of manual labor. The development of South Korean industry could also be folded neatly into the Japanese economy by ensuring that Japanese technology undergirded South Korean manufacturing, so that South Korean economic gains would inevitably help Japan, and thus conform to US economic planning for Northeast Asia. The economic development of South Korea was also important for U.S. Cold Warriors who sought to present it as an example of a functioning non-communist economy. The central U.S. foreign policy interest in South Korea was, after all, anti-communism, and not the democratization of South Korea nor the development of a laissez-faire capitalist economy. The U.S. supported the military dictatorship of Chung Hee Park so long as the regime remained intensely anti-communist, and it backed Park’s economic plan although it heavily emphasized state manipulation of the economy. The U.S. tolerated South Korea protectionism of its developing industries and opened key U.S. markets for these industries. U.S. interests changed with growing U.S. trade deficits beginning in the 1970s and the collapse of the Soviet Union, leading the U.S. to no longer support Korea’s protectionist policies. By the end of the 1980s, the U.S. successfully applied bilateral pressure through Section 301 of U.S. trade law and multilateral pressure through international economic agreements to force South Korea into lowering its trade barriers. The changing policies toward Korea are thus a historical reflection of shifting U.S. interests and its position in the world. U.S. interests were served by “opening” Korea in 1866, and they were served by closing Korea through Taft-Katsura in 1905. During the Cold War, U.S. interests were served by protecting South Korean industries, but today U.S. interests are being served by an ongoing “second opening” of Korea for U.S. corporate and agribusiness access. Labor Rights, Wages and Lessons from the Past Of course, not all sectors of the U.S. will benefit from this second opening. In particular, U.S. labor unions fear a repeat of past experiences with South Korean trade relations. The economic development of South Korea that began in earnest in the 1960s was accompanied by a decline of manufacturing jobs in the U.S. and the weakening of organized labor, as U.S. corporations took their factories to Asia and other parts of the world. Park’s iron fist ensured intense state and corporate-sponsored repression of workers who suffered in some of the worst working conditions in the world. The hyper-exploitation of South Korean workers meant that American manufacturers in the early 1960s could calculate that the labor cost saving for firms willing to move to Korea was a factor of 25, since South Korean workers were paid one tenth of American wages but were 2.5 times more productive given, for example, the extraordinary number of hours they put in per day, the lack of overtime, and the six-day work week. The migration and transformation of good jobs in the U.S. into bad jobs in South Korea is thus inextricably linked to the historical and continuing labor exploitation in South Korea. U.S. labor unions cannot be happy about the passage of the FTA given the implications of the current state of South Korean worker’s rights and labor conditions. The country’s economic freefall during the 1997 Asian financial crisis afforded the South Korean state and the chaebol an opportunity to reverse hard won gains of the South Korean labor movement, and since then workers have been fighting off declining working conditions, wages, and benefits. “Irregular workers,” who possess fewer labor rights and benefits and are hired on a temporary basis, currently constitute over half of all South Korean workers. Widespread state efforts to prevent the rise of independent unions have been a staple feature of South Korea since right-wing groups with U.S. backing created the Federation of Korean Trade Unions (FKTU) in 1946. Lacking a grassroots base, the FKTU raison d’etre was to compete with and destroy independent labor organizations. Although the FKTU has changed considerably since then, the South Korean government continues to demonstrate a willingness to intervene in the internal affairs of independent unions that emerged despite intense state and corporate-sponsored violence against workers. Labor demonstrations and protests were regularly broken up in the 1960s and 1970s by violent (public and private) police actions, and this continues to occur under Roh Administration. South Korean practices still do not reach international standards for worker’s rights and benefits. Key deficiencies include the prohibition of multiple unions at the enterprise level, continuing restrictions on government employee rights to organize, an overly broad definition of “essential public services” where the right to strike is repressed or prohibited, the prohibition for unemployed or dismissed workers to become or remain trade union workers, and the requirement for notification of third parties to industrial disputes. Agriculture and Korea’s Culture The rapid rise of industrial development in South Korea whereby good jobs in the U.S. turned into bad jobs in South Korea also saw a migration of Koreans from the countryside into the cities. In order to generate the labor force necessary to generate such rapid industrial development in urban areas during the 1960s and 1970s, Park kept grain prices below market rates and thus artificially expanded the labor pool in industrial centers as farmers were driven off their land even when they had bumper harvests. South Korea experienced an extraordinarily rapid—and generally unwilling—population shift from rural areas to the urban core, with farmer-turned-worker’s wages kept down as management rationalized that labor could be paid less since the market cost of food fell during this time due to the state’s pricing policies. This migration is relevant to current FTA talks because the negotiation of free trade policies covering agriculture are socially and politically complicated by the fact that so many South Koreans living in cities, only one generation ago, were living on family farms. Many South Koreans continue to have strong connections to their rural roots given how recently their personal lives diverged from decades if not centuries of family farming. The Korean peninsula has maintained a domestic agrarian economy for millennia, and the significance of farming goes beyond the economic into every aspect of South Korean society and culture, and especially in ordinary South Koreans connection to the land. Because Korean society was—and continues to be—so intimately tied to agricultural society, much of Korean culture as a whole is intimately based upon customs that have emerged through the cultivation of land. For many South Koreans, the relationship of low prices to the demise of family farms is not the theoretical abstraction that it is for advocates of neo-liberal policies who have not experienced the personal consequences of these policies, including rapid social, familial, and geographical dislocation. South Koreans experience the demise of South Korean agriculture as a loss of both national and family history and culture. Consequently, much of the South Korean population finds it not just appropriate but necessary to protect indigenous agriculture and support measures that they view as preserving South Korea’s national heritage and their family history. The importance of protecting agriculture not simply as an industry but as Korea’s history, culture, and land, has been reinforced by the rise of a middle-class environmental movement, the farmer and peasant movement, and their urban-based allies. In a particularly powerful example of the importance of agriculture to the average South Koreans, the three largest department store chains in South Korea—Lotte, Hyundai, and Shinsegae—each independently decided against purchasing cheaper imported rice and offering it to consumers, for fear of a public backlash against their chains that will influence their ability to sell other products offered at their stores. The South Korean agricultural sector is not export-oriented but instead strives to be self-sufficient in rice, horticultural products, and livestock production. Except for rice that works under a quota system, South Korea places a substantial tariff on agricultural products in order to protect these industries. Nevertheless, South Korea already imports about 60 to 0 percent of its agricultural products, and this percentage is certain to rise under the proposed FTA. South Korea currently has roughly 3.5 million farmers, or about 7.5 percent of the population. All farming in South Korea is done by individual farmers with small- to medium-size holdings, and the average American farm is 58 times larger than the average Korean farm. Like small family farmers in the United States, South Korea’s farmers cannot compete with large U.S. agribusiness capable of producing low-priced goods with the aid of significant U.S. government subsidies that will continue whether or not the FTA passes. Agricultural provisions in the new KORUS-FTA is likely to obliterate this indigenous base of family farmers, with at least half of Korea’s farmers expected to lose their farms. Those who can will enter urban areas in search of work, but half of South Korean farmers are now over 60 years old. Because we are not talking about simply about dollars and cents and won, but rather, about South Korean concerns over the preservation of its cultural and familial heritage (and for some South Koreans, their sovereignty as a food-secure nation), the rise of American agribusiness and the concomitant decline of South Korean family farmers are likely to result in intensified anti-Americanism not only in the agricultural sector, but through various sympathetic sectors within civil society. The sense of cultural loss and anti-Americanism is likely to be exacerbated by the recognition that the demise of South Korean family farms will come not at the hands of other family farmers, but rather by the entry of subsidized U.S. agribusiness. Conclusion The FTA negotiations between the U.S. and South Korea come at the height of strained relations between the two countries, with anti-Americanism on the rise in South Korea. The relationship between Washington and Seoul has declined considerably during the Bush Administration, with clear policy differences in their approaches to Korean reunification and the North Korean nuclear crisis. The deployment of South Korean troops to Iraq continues to be divisive and unpopular in South Korea, and South Korea’s attempt to link their support of the war in order to induce a more flexible Bush Administration posture toward North Korea clearly failed. Bush is widely unpopular in South Korea, as is the U.S. war on Iraq, and more South Koreans see the U.S. as a threat to their safety than they do North Korea. Passage of the FTA is no slam dunk, and no one should be surprised if it goes down to defeat. Should the FTA be enacted, the historical alliance between the U.S. and South Korea is likely to undergo further stress as anti-Americanism becomes tied not just to the Bush Administration policies in Iraq and toward North Korea, but also potentially to the negative consequences of an FTA that would significantly change the landscape—both literally and figuratively—of South Korea. Thomas P. Kim is the executive director of the Korea Policy Institute (KPI, online at kpolicy.org). KPI is an independent research and educational institute whose mission is to provide timely analysis of United States policies toward Korea and developments on the Korean peninsula in the interest of promoting friendship between the peoples of the U.S. and Korea. KPI was founded as a joint partnership between scholars and community activists who believe that “a reasonable U.S. policy towards Korea must be supportive of the legitimate desires of the Korean people for peace, sovereignty, reconciliation, and the reunification of Korea.” Kim is also an associate professor of politics & international relations at Scripps College.