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Minister for Food, Agriculture,
Forestry and Fisheries
Chang Tae-pyong |
By Kim Hyun-cheol
Staff Reporter
Korea will draw up guidelines for local companies investing in overseas agricultural businesses to better deal with the steeply growing market, the food and farming minister said Friday.
``The guidelines will be released early next year. The ministry is currently fine-tuning the details with other related offices,'' Minister for Food, Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries Chang Tae-pyong said in an interview with Yonhap News Agency after a meeting with World Trade Organization Director-General Pascal Lamy.
``Expansion in agricultural investments should continue, like those currently in Southeast Asia and Africa. To Korea, raising food self-efficiency is as important as exploring oil fields abroad,'' he said.
In exchange for increased foreign aid in agriculture, the country will seek more opportunities for young Korean people to work in related international organizations including the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the minister said.
Chang met with Lamy after an international summit hosted by the FAO in Rome, Italy, where he also delivered a keynote speech.
They shared views on the ongoing Doha Development Agenda (DDA) at the meeting, a ministry spokesman said.
Chang reportedly told Lamy during their meeting in Geneva, Switzerland, that Korea, which will preside over a G20 Summit next year, will do its upmost to finalize the current negotiations for the global development initiative as soon as possible.
Negotiations for the DDA need to be flexible enough to reflect different circumstances of participants, Chang was quoted as saying, and their consequences should meet interests of both developed and developing countries.
Especially in the agricultural section, he stressed that tariff caps on some items, such as rice, has significant meaning for South Korea, and urged such provisions to be maintained as initially agreed on.
In response, Lamy reiterated the principle that it takes cooperative moves from major countries including Korea to achieve the ultimate goal of DDA negotiations, which focus on the improvement of market access in general and substantial reduction of state-backed subsidiaries.
Before the meeting in Geneva, Chang delivered a keynote speech at the FAO World Summit on Food Security in Rome, Italy, where he reiterated Korea will provide $100 million in aid over the next three years to help improve food security issues for developing economies as it pledged at a meeting of the U.N. Millennium Development Goals in September.
During the speech, he also suggested that the FAO host international joint studies to delve into factors causing grain prices to fluctuate, in an attempt to establish ways to deal with periodical food crises worldwide.
hckim@koreatimes.co.kr
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