Organic Farming Takes Root in South Korea Amidst Farm Crisis

The Legacy of Lee Kyung Hae
By John Feffer, AlterNet
Posted on August 29, 2005, Printed on August 30, 2005
http://www.alternet.org/story/24074/

The South Korean farmer snaps a cucumber in two to show me the drops of
moisture that bead to the surface around the break. "If you put it back
together and wait a minute, then it will stick together," Yang Yoon Seok
says. Sure enough, he easily rejoins the severed halves and the cucumber is
once again whole. He shakes it around in the air, and, like magic, the
vegetable remains intact. "It's not magic," he tells me. "It's organic."
The Smile Farm is all organic, a little magical, and very possibly the
future of Korean agriculture. It's not a huge farm -- only 4000 pyong or a
little over 3 acres. On those three acres, though, Farmer Yang grows thirty
kinds of vegetables, all of them organic. He supplies organic stores in the
South Korean capital of Seoul, sixty kilometers to the north. He also sells
produce from a store that fronts the nearby road and distributes vegetables
through South Korea's new organic e-farm system on the web. Thousands of
visitors a year make the pilgrimage to study Yang's growing and marketing
techniques.

Smile is located in an idyllic part of the country, nestled alongside the
Han River that flows north into Seoul. Because the Han supplies the capital
with drinking water, all the farms in the vicinity of Smile are required to
protect the environment and the river. As such, the area is home to the
greatest concentration of organic farms in Korea. As we wander through the
greenhouses and Yang Yoon Seok shows me his huge sesame leaves, demonstrates
his natural pesticide spray of molasses and alkaline water, and I sample
some deliciously sweet cherry tomatoes, it is very easy to forget that
Korean agriculture is in a desperate crisis.

The media has covered the collapse of agriculture in North Korea and the
resulting famine that has killed as much as ten percent of the population.
Receiving far less attention has been the plight of farmers in the South, an
agricultural crisis that is hiding in plain sight.

Crisis in the South

For a brief moment two years ago, South Korean farmers suddenly leaped into
the media spotlight. On September 10, 2003, Lee Kyung Hae, a farmer and
former parliamentarian, stood at the front of a 300-strong South Korean
delegation of farmers and union activists protesting at the World Trade
Organization ministerial in Cancun. It appeared that he, like the others,
was simply trying to breach the fence and disrupt the meeting. Unexpectedly,
however, Lee pulled out a knife and plunged it into his heart, committing
suicide. In the statement that he passed out just prior to his death, he
wrote that "uncontrolled multinational corporations and a small number of
big WTO Members are leading an undesirable globalization that is inhumane,
environmentally degrading, farmer-killing, and undemocratic."

Lee Kyung Hae's suicide not only surprised his compatriots. It surprised
many people who believed South Korean agriculture to be a success story.
After all, food is plentiful and comparatively inexpensive. The rural areas
look green and prosperous. In the space of two generations, South Korea has
moved from an agrarian nation with a per capita income in 1960 of a
sub-Saharan country to the ranks of the top industrialized countries in the
world. Even as more and more people moved to the cities for better paid
jobs, Korean farms raised their yields to feed the growing ranks of
industrial workers throughout the 1970s and 1980s.

But low prices for food, a depopulated countryside, and an industrial
approach to boosting yields have all contributed to bringing the farming
sector to the brink of crisis. Even producers of the mainstays of the Korean
diet -- rice and pickled vegetables (kimchi) -- have hit hard times. Rice
farmers are grappling with falling rates of rice consumption, despite
government efforts to promote such innovations as rice pizza and rice ice
cream. Koreans are increasingly eating kimchi imported from China, where
Korean companies have relocated to take advantage of the low cost of labor
and cabbage.

"South Korea is successful?" Kwon Young Geun of the Korean Agricultural
Society Research Institute asks rhetorically. "I don't think so. People have
moved away from the countryside. Self-sufficiency has decreased even though
yields have increased. There has been the penetration of multinational
corporations. Of the 50 global food franchises, 40 of them are here in South
Korea."

Kwon attributes this diminishing self-sufficiency to the effects of the
Green Revolution, a bundle of technological changes that revolved around
new, high-yield seed varieties, increased application of fertilizers and
pesticides, and greater use of irrigated water. These changes effectively
industrialized the countryside by making farmers dependent on seed companies
(rather than saving seeds themselves), suppliers of fertilizer (a petroleum
product), and irrigation equipment. North Korea similarly came to depend on
Green Revolution-style modifications. Indeed, North and South Korea were
among the top five users of chemical fertilizers in the world. Both
countries also relied heavily on chemical pesticides to make up for the
diminishing returns from the fertilizers. Agriculture in both countries
requires large inputs of energy, which is also largely imported.
However much the Green Revolution might have eroded the sustainability of
South Korean agriculture, it was two decisions made by the United States
[PDF link] in the 1980s that created the conditions against which Lee Kyung
Hae struggled so mightily. Bilaterally, at the end of the 1980s, the United
States began to threaten trade sanctions -- through the infamous Section 301
trade law -- against countries that maintained trade barriers to protect
domestic industries. Washington applied enormous pressure on Seoul to open
its markets to U.S. tobacco, wine, rice, and beef. Today, the only important
resistance remains in the rice sector (at the end of 2004, South Korea won
another ten-year extension for its tariffs but only in exchange for doubling
the percentage of foreign imports). Bilateral free trade agreements with
Chile and China will also likely hit Korea's agricultural sector hard.
At the multilateral level, meanwhile, the United States in the mid-1980s
argued that agriculture should be included in trade negotiations. In the
immediate postwar era, the United States maintained tariff walls to protect
its own agricultural sector and used the food surpluses to strengthen Cold
War alliances. By the 1980s, however, trade and budget deficits -- and a
declining need to subsidize the economies of allies for Cold War purposes --
motivated Washington to change its position. Eventually the World Trade
Organization emerged as an arena in which powerful agricultural producers
pressured everyone else to expose their "uncompetitive" farming sectors to
global market forces. As its tariff walls began to crumble, South Korea
began to import more Thai rice, U.S. wheat, and Latin American soybeans.
Korean consumers enjoyed lower prices; Korean farmers faced higher debt. Lee
Kyung Hae lost his own farm because of the flood of cheap Australian beef
into the Korean market.

"During the Uruguay Round in the 1990s, the Korean government tried to
protect farmers," Kwon Young Geun says. "But it gave up because the
industrial sector was much more powerful."

There was no more poignant example of this discrepancy in power between the
agricultural and industrial sectors in South Korea than the "garlic war" of
2000. Responding to complaints from farmers over cheaper imports, the Korean
government slapped a 315 percent tariff on Chinese garlic. When China
retaliated with trade restrictions on mobile phones and polyethylene, Korea
backed down. Garlic may be a popular ingredient in Asian cuisine, but people
all over the world use Korean mobile phones and the product provides
considerable trade revenues.

The Organic Solution?

South Korea's organic sector is small but growing. The number of organic
farms more than doubled from 1999 to 2002 while the acreage and amount of
production tripled. But most of the "green" farming done in South Korea
falls in the category of "environmentally friendly" rather than organic (2.5
percent versus .02 percent according to a report by Landry Consulting
[PDF]). Under the "environmentally friendly" category, farmers can still use
chemical pesticides and fertilizers, though in considerably reduced
quantities.

As in other countries, the Korean demand for organic produce outstrips the
supply. But organic farmers have a tough time making ends meet, according to
Na Gi-Soo of the Korea Organic Farming Association. They get very little in
the way of government support. The higher prices for agricultural produce
are not large enough to make up for the roughly 40 percent of production
that has to be thrown out or sold at discount because it isn't up to high
consumer standards.

Still, Korean farmers are not in it for the money. "In the West, consumers
became wealthier and had the economic capacity to think about food
security," explains Na. "So they went to farmers to ask for organic products
and said, 'If you grow these organic crops, we'll buy everything.' In Korea
it was totally the opposite. Farmers suffered a great deal from the
pesticides and chemical fertilizers. They felt that even if they made a lot
of money they'd die from such farming. So they thought they would do farming
without chemicals."

The industrial miracle that made South Korea into one of the top dozen
economies of the world poisoned the people and countryside. In the 2005
Environmental Sustainability Index [PDF], South Korea ranked 122 out of 146
nations, the worst showing of any industrialized country. Air and water
pollution is notoriously bad. The environmental movement has grown more
powerful over the last decade, however, and has sparked ever-growing
interest in chemical-free food.

Even in the organic sector, though, South Korean farmers face competition
from imports, especially vegetables from China. Researcher and activist Kwon
Young Geun is not worried about Chinese competition: "The quality of Chinese
organic products is much lower than Korean products. When Korean farmers do
organic farming, it is just like a religion it is of such a high quality."
The South Korean government has put some money and influence behind the
organic movement -- with the Sustainable Agriculture Promotion Act of 1998
and direct payments to farmers who use environment-friendly practices --
though critics argue that this effort is insufficient. By a twist in the WTO
rules, such environmentally friendly policies can operate underneath the
radar, so to speak, of the free-trade regime. Government subsidies that
promote environmental protection and sustainability are sheltered from trade
liberalization by the "Green Box" in current agricultural negotiations.
Europe has begun to shift its subsidy structure greenward. South Korea could
profitably follow the European example.

Next Stop: Hong Kong

Lee Kyung Hae worked for many years with the Korean Organic Farming
Association before desperation drove him to commit suicide in 2003. Although
KOFA's Na Gi-Soo believes that the situation for organic farming has
improved dramatically -- "compared to five years ago, the difference is
between heaven and hell" -- he acknowledges that the situation overall
remains bleak. "Lee Kyung Hae went to the WTO meeting in Cancun and killed
himself because the reality of farmers in South Korea is so desperate," Na
says. "South Korea has no agriculture-oriented policy. Most farmers are old,
many older than 70. Lee did let the world know about the situation of the
Korean countryside. The South Korean government and other governments stated
that they were sad about his death. But there was no big change in Korean
agricultural policy. It's a sad thing."

In 1970, a similarly despondent activist named Chun Tae-Il poured gasoline
over himself at a labor demonstration and lit a match. "We are not
machines," the 22-year-old cried as the flames enveloped him. Chun committed
suicide to protest the unspeakably difficult situation of Korean sweatshop
laborers. It would take more than a dozen years before a labor movement
gathered force in Korea to change working conditions and help usher in
democratic governance.

Korean farmers are similarly digging in their heels for the long haul, with
the sacrifice of Lee Kyung Hae still fresh in their minds. In December 2005
when the WTO ministerial regroups in Hong Kong, South Koreans will be there
again. "The peasant movement remembers him and commemorates him," says Kwon
Young Geun. "We plan to go to Hong Kong in December to ask for the justice
that he sought."

John Feffer is working on a book about the global politics of food.

© 2005 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/24074/