North and South Korea yesterday reached a landmark agreement aimed at dropping overseas intermediaries and shifting to direct inter-Korean trade, officials here said.
According to a nine-point agreement reached at the end of bilateral economic talks, North Korea also agreed to allow South Korean delegations to visit the Stalinist state to verify that food aid is fairly distributed among the needy.
The agreement was reached at the end of the sixth round of economic talks which have been overshadowed by nuclear crisis talks underway in Beijing.
"We made a proposal to open an office for small and mid-sized firms seeking to engage in direct trade and the North accepted it," said Kim Kwang-Rim, the head of the South Korean delegation to the three-day talks.
The office will be set up in Kaesong, North Korea's southernmost city located close to the inter-Korean border.
South Korea's Hyundai business group is building a huge industrial park in Kaesong, some 70km north of Seoul.
Hundreds of South Korean businessess, including garment, footwear and other labor-intensive firms, want to move their plants there to take advantage of low wage North Korean workforce.
Trade between the two Koreas for the first half of the year stood at US$269 million, up 25.2 percent from a year earlier. Most of it is conducted through overseas intermediaries.
Inter-Korean economic exchange and trade has been increasing sharply since a historic summit in 2000 between then South Korean president Kim Dae-Jung and the North's leader Kim Jong-Il.
The nine-point agreement released to the press also said North Korea would allow South Korea to make on-site inspections of three of North Korea's food distribution centers next month.
In May, South Korea agreed to send 400,000 tonnes of rice aid to the North, of which almost 100,000 tonnes has already been shipped.
The communist country has come under attack for allegedly diverting international food aid away from intended beneficiaries.
The impoverished country has been relying heavily on outside handouts to feed its 22 million people since the mid-1990s when natural disasters devastated its meager agriculture production. Most of the aid has come from donations provided by the US, China and Japan, as well as several NGOs.
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