The figure worth pulling apart is the increment: 260 billion won, the gap between the 2022 estimate of up to 440 billion a year and the new one of more than 700 billion, which is about 59 per cent more damage read off the same treaty text four years later [1][1][2]. The study's own reasoning narrows where that increase can sit. Livestock exposure is described as limited, because tariffs on Australian beef already disappear in 2028 and those on Canadian and New Zealand beef in 2029 under bilateral deals Korea signed years ago [8]. Tariff protection already on a path to expiring by those dates has no further room to fall. So the widening concentrates in the lines where tariffs are not already walking to zero, which is horticulture and dairy, and that is precisely where farm groups say the losses will land [6].
Apples are the interesting puzzle inside that. They are roughly 25 per cent of domestically grown fruit, the largest single share, and have never been opened to imports; eleven countries including the CPTPP members Japan, Australia and New Zealand have applied for import risk assessments, and none has cleared Korea's sanitary and phytosanitary requirements [7]. A tariff commitment only prices access; the SPS queue is what actually delivers it, and across eleven applications the queue has yet to clear a single one so far [7].
Against a farm sector that produced 62.7 trillion won last year, 700 billion is 1.12 per cent [3][4], and fifteen years of it is at least 10.5 trillion won of foregone output [2]. This desk's read, and it is a read rather than a reported fact, is that the study's real function is not forecasting but pricing: under the trade agreements law the government has to complete an economic feasibility review covering real GDP growth, consumer welfare and individual industries before it can open negotiations [3], and the number it publishes becomes the floor for the September talks with umbrella farmers' organisations and commodity producer groups [5]. Seoul cannot now table a compensation package built on a smaller loss than its own model produced.
The offsetting side is weaker than it looks arithmetically and stronger than it looks politically. The 2022 study projected manufacturing net exports rising by up to $900 million, about 1.24 trillion won, a year over the same fifteen years, and the new study is understood to have raised that several times over [10]; even at the old figure that is 1.8 won of export gain per won of farm loss, a net 540 billion [4]. Diffuse gainers do not organise. The Korea Advanced Farmers Federation, which puts CPTPP members' average agricultural tariff elimination at close to 97 per cent against Korea's roughly 72, a 25 point gap, can name the commodity [9][5].
The range of outcomes is still open. The SPS process holds, imports do not materialise at modelled volumes, and the 700 billion is paid for anyway as a transfer. Or the compensation bill is set by the 25 point framing rather than the model and comes in well above 700 billion a year. Or Seoul decides the queue of eleven applicants including Indonesia, the United Arab Emirates and China makes waiting the expensive option and buys the farm sector out fast [12]. I would be wrong about the compensation bill being the binding constraint if September produces meetings without a number.
