By Jung Sung-ki
Staff Reporter
South and North Korea Tuesday opened their working-level talks on repairing a key highway in the North, an agreement struck during the inter-Korean summit last October, the Ministry of Unification said.
The two-day talks began in North Korea's border city of Gaeseong, where an inter-Korea industrial complex is located, it said.
During the summit in Pyongyang, President Roh Moo-hyun and North Korean leader Kim Jong-il agreed to jointly repair the highway linking Gaeseong and Pyongyang as part of a package of cross-border economic cooperation projects.
Kim Myong-guk, chief road planning official of the Ministry of Construction and Transportation, leads the South Korean delegation, while Kang Su-jin, deputy bureau chief of the Ministry of Land and Environmental Protection, represents the North at the Gaeseong talks, ministry officials said.
During the first day of talks, the two sides reviewed the outcome of an on-site survey of the road, which was conducted by South Korean officials in December, and discussed how to repair and use the road jointly in the future, they said.
Currently, South Koreans can travel or transport materials to the Gaeseong industrial park using an overland route across the heavily fortified border. About 65 South Korean firms are operating in the business complex with some 20,000 North Korean workers.
It is unclear, however, if the repair project is to be implemented under the Lee Myung-bak government because the new South Korean leader has pledged his administration would put South Korean-backed big-budget cross-border projects on the backburner.
Last month, the two Koreas agreed to run their cross-border cargo trains flexibly to improve efficiency in their working-level talks.
The regular freight service across the border began in December for the first time in 56 years, the first tangible result of the second inter-Korean summit.
The operation of cargo trains was aimed at slashing the cost of transporting products to and from the Gaeseong complex. But the train service has been called inefficient because the 12-car train has often operated empty with the level of output at the complex remaining low.