Officials from North and South Korea on Sunday opened a second day of talks aimed at increasing economic exchanges and cooperation.
The talks on this southern resort island of Jeju started shortly after 10 a.m. with the first plenary meeting of North and South Korean delegates to the ongoing round.
The four-day meeting of the Inter-Korean Economic Cooperation Promotion Committee began Saturday after the North's 17-member delegation arrived here via Beijing.
North Korea's chief delegate to the talks, Ju Tong-chan, was to give a speech at the opening of the plenary session, during which the North was expected to renew its requests for Seoul to assist North Korea's light industries.
"The heightening expectations and interests from here and abroad for increased economic cooperation between North and South Korea demand that we significantly and broadly expand inter-Korean economic cooperation projects," Ju said in a speech at a welcoming dinner hosted by his South Korean counterpart, Vice Finance Minister Bahk Byong-won on Saturday.
Pyongyang has long sought raw materials to supply its shoe and garment industries, and has offered Seoul in exchange the right to jointly develop and use its natural resources.
The South Korean government is reluctant to provide such assistance before securing North Korea's assurance that it will repay the costs incurred, according to officials at the Unification Ministry.
The communist state also asked for half a million tons of rice during the latest round of inter-Korean ministerial talks in its capital Pyongyang in late April.
"The North would like to sign an agreement at the 12th economic cooperation talks," a senior official from the Unification Ministry said.
However, the official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the North was unlikely to receive as much as the two sides had previously agreed.
The Unification Ministry said previously that the countries have reached, or "neared," a long-negotiated agreement on economic cooperation for the impoverished North, and that the new round of the economic talks would merely be a formal ceremony to stipulate and sign the agreement.
But its officials now say the government is unlikely to sign the agreement as previously drafted because the North has already breached part of the agreement to test two cross-border railways.
The verbal agreement from a working-level meeting at the North's border town of Kaesong last month included a test run of inter-Korean railways for the first time in over half a century.
Pyongyang called off the tests on May 24, just one day prior to the day they were scheduled to start, citing what it claimed to be hostile U.S. forces in the South and the lack of a military agreement covering the opening of the cross-border railways.
"I, myself, am not completely satisfied with the speed of inter-Korean economic cooperation," the South Korean chief delegate to the talks said at Saturday's welcoming dinner.
"I am confident that speeding up or expanding inter-Korean economic cooperation is still very possible if both sides continue to hold dialogue based on mutual trust, and implement what they have agreed to do," he added.
The two Koreas remain divided along one of the world's most heavily-fortified borders since the end of the three-year Korean War in 1953.
By Byun Duk-kun JEJU ISLAND, South Korea, June 4 (Yonhap)
North and South Korea resume talks on economic cooperation |
