"We made substantial progress in our discussions," U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk said in a statement after a final meeting with South Korean Trade Minister Kim Jong-hoon.
"It's time for the leaders to review this progress before we move forward," Kirk said.
Once that has been done, "then we will synchronize the same time and date to go into a detailed announcement," the South Korean trade minister said before heading to the airport.
South Korea is the United States' seventh-largest trading partner and eighth-largest export market. Last year, the United States exported $28.6 billion worth of goods to South Korea and imported $39.2 billion of products from that country, for a U.S. deficit of 10.6 billion.
Kim also said this week's meetings made "a great deal of progress" on issues blocking approval of the Korea-U.S Free Trade Agreement, which is known as KORUS and was signed on June 30, 2007. The pact has mainly been delayed by U.S. auto and beef industry concerns.
The United States exported 7,663 cars and light trucks to South Korea in 2009 while it imported 476,857 from automakers there, according to U.S. Commerce Department figures.
A South Korean government statement said the talks this week "produced a substantial outcome on autos and other limited areas." It did not mention beef, but U.S. officials said they had not abandoned their objectives in that area.
KORUS would be the second-largest U.S. free trade agreement after the North American Free Trade Agreement with Canada and Mexico of the mid-1990s. Supporters also see it as linchpin of U.S. economic engagement in the fast-growing Asian region.
"It would help create American jobs. It would help create innovation in the United States and help American businesses get a foothold in the fastest-growing region of the world," said Karan Bhatia, a former U.S. trade official who helped negotiate the original deal.
Beef, Auto Concerns
Details of the progress made by the two countries were not immediately available. But Kim said he hoped it would set the stage for the U.S. and South Korean legislatures to approve the trade deal in 2011, after the leaders of the two nations review and approve what negotiators have done.
This week's meeting came after negotiators failed to meet a self-imposed deadline last month to solve the problems. That cast doubt on President Barack Obama's plan to submit the agreement to Congress for approval in 2011.
The United States has pressed South Korea to renegotiate the auto terms of the 2007 agreement, given the vast imbalance in auto trade, something that is politically difficult for Seoul to do without getting concessions of equal weight from Washington in return.
Ford Motor Co and its supporters in Congress complain the lopsided trade is due to South Korean tax and regulatory barriers that KORUS fails to adequately address.
Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus also wants Seoul to commit to a process for fully reopening its market to U.S. beef exports, another politically difficult demand because of strong South Korean public opposition.
U.S. beef exporters have already recovered much of their lost market share in South Korea under a voluntary industry agreement to address lingering concerns about several cases of mad cow disease found in the U.S. cattle herd as far back as December 2003.
Much of the beef industry is eager to have the pact approved because it phases out a 40-percent South Korean tariff on U.S. beef and because a major competitor, Australia, is negotiating its own free-trade pact with South Korea.
U.S. officials have declined to say if the United States would make concessions on its side to compensate South Korea for changing the terms of the deal the two countries signed in 2007 after a year of negotiation. (Reuters)
