Another Trade Opportunity Seoul Should Not Repeat 'Beef Mistakes With EU' If Korea and the European Union(EU) manage to announce the conclusion of their free trade agreement in London next mnth, it will have mmultiple meanings. Most of all, it will signify the 23 months of arduous negoriations to eliminate tariff and non-tariff trade barriers between the world's biggest and 13th-largest economies coming to fruition, ringing an alarm bell to global traders turning inward faced with the once-in-a-century economic crisis. And the bell will likely ring loudest in the ears of the United States, in which the Democrat0controlled White House and Congress are showing sings of protectionism by obligating the use of homemade steel and other construction materials in governmentalprojects. The symbolic declaration of the Korea-EU FTA will help Brussels in its tug-of war with Washington over the remedy to pull the world out of the deepening recession. For Seoul, it will serve as leverage to force their reluctant U.S. counterpart to put their long-pending free trade accord into immediate effect. Pushing Washington, however, should be a secondary goal at best, particularly for Korea. Though hidden by the controversial Korea-U.S. free trade agreement, the free trade accord with the world's largest economic bloc, with a combined gross domestic product (GDP) of $14.2 trillion in 2007, could offer both opportunities and challenges even bigger than those of the so-called KORUS FTA. The EU is also Korea's second largest trade partner after China, with the two-way trade volume reaching $92.8 billion. The Korea-EU FTA will eliminate all trade barriers and most of the non-traiff barriers in five years, meaning major consumer goods, including automobiles and consumer electronics, will have to stage no-holds-barred competition in both markets. Unlike uncompetitive U.S. cars, European motor behicles, particularly luxury sedans, will likely dominate the already struggling Korean cars, while the world's top-class handsets will seriously threaten the near-monopoly of Korean cell phones here. A bigger worry, as is the case with the KORUS FTA, lies in the agricultural sector. If cheap and juicy - if not completely safe - U.S. beef was the source of concerns for Korean farmers, the biggest challenge from Europe will be pork and dairy products. And this is why the government's trade policymakers should not be in too much of a hurry to demonstrate it is the champio of free trade at the G-20 summit in early April, but make double or triple checks on the Korea-EU FTA accords to find ways of lessening the damage to domestic livestock farmers. Finding proper way of protecting and/or compensating domestic farmers is all the more urgent, because the FTA with the EU will take effect far earlier than the KORUS FTA, as the EU has already wo approval from its 27 member nations on major phases of bargaining. Seoul can hardly afford to make technical mistakes concerning sanitary and other incidental conditions, as it did with the United States. Despite the Korea-EU FTA and Seoul's coercion, Washington will hardly be hurried into the ratification of the KORUS FTA. If its reopening is inevitable, therefore, the Korean officials had better not keep refusing it, but try to supplment the accord by comparing it with the European examples. As seen in the attitudes of major governemnts, the ultimte goal is not free trade itself but how to use it to maximize the national interest.