Regional trade agreement(RTA) including FTA is the main stream of world trade, while DDA negotiation has a rough passage. Over 50% of the world trade amount is interchanged between countries who conclude RTAs.
Korea, who is heavily depends on export, has actively engaged in FTA negotiations, and 15 FTAs have entered into force. Korea signed with The United States, and agreed to work toward singing the agreement with EU. Korea is negotiating FTAs with 15 countries including Canada.
Conclusions of FTAs contribute to national economy by increasing amount of intra-trade with trade diversion effects and by increasing production with trade creation effects. Forestry industry, however, which has weak international competitiveness, is expected to have great impacts. It is necessary to study to minimize the impacts and to be ready for the competition, consequently.
This study is designed to estimate and understand the impacts on Korean forestry sector, and to prepare strategies to strengthen the competitiveness if Korea concludes FTAs with EU, Canada and China. The contents includes current aspects of FTA and tasks, domestic conditions of the forestry sector, trends of trades with those countries, and comparisons of competitiveness and impacts. Survey and analysis have done to find determinants of forestry competitiveness against 137 specialists in colleges, research institutes and industry, and producers. Finally strategies are suggested to strengthen the competitiveness required in forestry sector, which is comprised of timber as well as non-timber products, for the FTAs.
The chief results are summarized as follows. The main effect to forestry competitiveness comes from the government, and the weakest area of competitiveness is extension of the forestry industry currently. The main tasks to strengthen competitiveness of non-timber products are differentiation of government support according to the importance of the undertaking, enlargement and systematization of production and circulation organizations, construction of safety management system, preparation of bring up and utilizing system for specialists, building cluster system focusing on the main production areas, research development focusing on the field and continuous distribution of technologies, development, management and distribution of promising products, and diversification of export markets. For timber industry the tasks are as follows: constructing a stable system of domestic log supply, introduction of quality certification system, diversification and stabilization of log supply by oversea plantation, development and distribution of wooden house made of domestic log, build a wood industry complex.