We need to deeply consider how agricultural policy is supposed to be as the market is becoming fully opened. In addition, the per capita income will soon be more than 30 thousand dollars, which we believe is a condition for becoming a developed country. Korea's agricultural policy is in the stage of moving from one emphasizing adequacy to the one that puts more emphasis on its efficiency.
Small size farming, low income level, and aging farmers would represent the current problems of Korean agriculture. Whether the Korean agriculture is ready or not for full market opening, the DDA and FTA will be continued for further opening. When the agricultural market opens wider, it is obvious that price drop will deteriorate profitability in agriculture. However, the agriculture has relatively less alternatives in profit making compared with other industries. For minimizing the impact of market opening, the role of the government is getting bigger. But, we lack the time for preparation. Interest contradiction among different groups in agriculture will even make the process slower. Like it or not, the Korean market will be fully opened after 2014. The current paradigm in agricultural policy can’t bring about advanced agriculture; hence, we are looking for alternatives and new ideas.
We define an advanced agricultural policy as “the one where the growths in agriculture and non-agricultural sectors are balanced and that there is no radical exit of valuable resources from the agricultural sector. Technology and resource allocation efficiency is high enough to have productivity, which is equivalent to the one that of advanced countries. And social consent is high enough to easily solve conflicts among social classes or among different interest parties.” To have advanced agricultural policies, we propose to set the following policy objectives: “higher valued-added high-tech agriculture,” “safe and secure food supply,” “stable income and living conditions of small- to midium-sized farmers,” and “value re-creation of rural areas.”
The tasks we derived from the study to achieve policy objectives are as follows: In the field of labor policy, it is summarized as acquiring successors and raising professional farmers who are capable of using advanced managing skills and technologies. In the field of farmland, it is emphasized to acquire and preserve good farmlands, use farmland more efficiently, and reinforce the planning and monitoring of usage. In the field of farm income, it is necessary to provide farmers with more opportunity to earn non-farm income and to build a DB where all the relevant information of farmers are kept. To secure the stability of farm income, the protection from not only natural disasters but also from the variation in price is required, and such a device is income insurance or income stabilization account similar to the CAIS in Canada. In the field of R&D, it is most important to choose research topics based on the demands of farmers because they are mostly practical and easily applicable. Also, we expect that making the relations among users, developers, and distributors of technology to be connected with incentives will support the establishment of a more efficient R&D system in agriculture. For marketing and food consumption, it is urgent to build a concrete food safety control system that is achievable only when it is appropriately backed up by technology and related rules. Regional development in rural areas is conditional on reinforcing decentralization to secure regional compatibility, where practical goals and directions are achieved by segmenting regions so that each region can design its own program. Public and social insurance policies need to systematize the public's rights to basic life, elderly and public pensions, direct payments for transferring farm management, and to reorganize the public income safety system.
Researchers: Seongjae Park, Taegon Kim, Hogun Chong, Youngsoo Cho, Yongwon Cho
E-mail address: seongjae@krei.re.kr