Ministry of Trade Industry and Resources

The Ministry of Trade, Industry and Resources (MOTIR, Minister JK Kim) held the 11th Korea–Chile Free Trade Commission meeting in Seoul on October 19, 2026. The Korean and Chilean delegations were led by Park Keun-oh, Director General for Trade Agreement Policy at MOTIR, and Felipe Lopeandía Wielandt, Director General for Bilateral Economic Affairs at Chile’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, respectively.

The Korea–Chile Free Trade Agreement (FTA) entered into force in 2004 as Korea’s first FTA. The agreement is seen as having helped Korean companies enter Latin American markets, with bilateral trade rising from USD 1.57 billion in 2003, before the FTA took effect, to USD 6.4 billion in 2025.

The commission met for the first time in ten years, as a follow-up to an agreement reached at the bilateral summit in July 2026 to review FTA implementation and discuss trade and investment cooperation, including upgrading the agreement.

The two sides reviewed FTA implementation, including progress on updating the product-specific rules of origin (PSRs) from Harmonized System (HS) 2012 to HS 2022 and the exchange of FTA utilization statistics. They also discussed a broad range of mutually beneficial cooperation measures to strengthen bilateral trade relations, including ways to advance negotiations on upgrading the Korea–Chile FTA in areas such as minerals cooperation.