FTA should be ratified before S. Korean leader's trip: Rep. Ros-Lehtinen

(ATTN: UPDATES with remarks on inter-Korean industrial zone in last 9 paras) By Lee Chi-dong WASHINGTON, Sept. 23 (Yonhap) -- As the U.S. Congress braces for a vote on the free trade pact with South Korea, a senior Republican member at the House Friday stressed the need to pass it before President Lee Myung-bak makes a state visit next month. The White House and the Republicans in the House are set for full-fledged consultations on the renewal of a controversial worker aid program and the fate of the free trade agreements (FTAs) with South Korea, Colombia and Panama. "It appears that the process for allowing Congress to consider these agreements is finally under way," Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL), chairwoman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said at a hearing on the FTAs. Her comments came a day after the Senate approved President Barack Obama's push for extending the Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA) program, aimed at providing job training and financial support for workers displaced by trade. Many Republican members of Congress are opposed to the budget-gulping program as they question its effectiveness amid a federal debt crisis. Obama has been apparently seeking "political assurances" that the TAA will be renewed, along with the ratification of the FTAs, before sending the trade pacts to Congress. "It looks likely that the three FTAs will soon be sent to Capitol Hill to be voted on," Ros-Lehtinen said. "Passage of the South Korea FTA before President Lee arrives in Washington in October would be a tremendous reaffirmation of our alliance with that key country." Lee is scheduled to hold summit talks with Obama in Washington on Oct. 13. "And as we vote, let us remember that we are voting to knock down the barriers to U.S. businesses and to create the jobs that so many Americans and their families are desperately in need of," she said, citing an official estimate that the FTA will lead to the creation of at least 70,000 jobs in the U.S. Rep. Brad Sherman (D-CA) raised worries over a possible negative impact from goods made in the inter-Korean industrial zone just north of the Demilitarized Zone dividing the two Koreas. He claimed that if products from the Kaesong Industrial Complex flow into the U.S. without tariffs, it would deprive Americans of "tens of billions of dollars of jobs." He pointed out some workers in North Korea are paid US$8 per month. Rep. Ed Royce (R-CA) dismissed the concerns. "We've got enhanced customs provisions in KORUS FTA. We've kept out of this agreement any North Korean goods," he said. "It would require congressional approval to allow anything in here." Created in 2002 under Seoul's "sunshine policy" of engaging Pyongyang at that time, the Kaesong complex is designed to benefit from the South's capital and technology and the North's cheap labor and land. More than 40,000 North Korean workers are now employed by more than 100 South Korean firms there, producing watches, clothes, utensils and other goods. The status of goods produced in Kaesong was a sticking point in the negotiations of the KORUS FTA, signed in 2007 and pending in the parliaments of the two sides. The two sides struck a rather vague deal on the issue. For now, it would not give preferential treatment to finished products made in the area. But the agreement calls for the establishment of a binational committee, a year after the FTA takes effect, to discuss whether the Kaesong industrial zone should be given preferential treatment.