Research Reports
Social Conflicts in the Korean Agricultural Sector and Their Management : Focusing on Two Recent Cases
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AuthorKim, Hongsang
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Publication Date2004.12.01
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Original
ABSTRACT
The purpose of this study is to overview the conflicts between actors in the Korean agricultural sector under various conditions in structural, institutional, and cultural dimensions and to reify their major interests and values. Based on the hermeneutic research, the study will derive policy implications from recent experiences and suggest specific policy alternatives regarding conflict management. To this end, this study has conducted the theoretical review and empirical research, where the current situation of social conflicts in the agricultural sector were mapped out and the two most prominent conflict cases were analyzed in depth: the Korea-Chile Free Trade Agreement and the restructuring of Jangcheon Agricultural Cooperative.
Theoretical background for the empirical research consists of two parts. One is the theories on social conflict. Based on these, the study has conceptualized the social conflict as “an ongoing socio-political process in which various social actors are continuously exchanging their interests and values with one another.” The other is the theories on conflict management, which contain two different practical expectations: the public administrative imperative(efficiency enhancement in policy process) and the socio-political reform imperative(participatory democracy or governance). The study has put relatively more emphasis on the latter, conceptualizing the conflict management as “a governance in which third-party public or private agencies as well as the conflicting actors prevent, regulate, or resolve discrepancies in their interests and values.” Following these conceptual approaches, the empirical research was conducted in forms of the general overview of social conflicts in the current agricultural sector and the institutional assets for their management on the one hand, and the in-depth field research on the recent experiences on the other.
The results are as follows:
First of all, the existent or latent social conflicts lied in the contexts of the integration of the world economic system, free trade-oriented national agricultural policy, and the diversification of peasants and their relative deprivation of socio-economic welfare to non-agricultural sectors. Reflecting the contexts, main issues in conflicts are the opening of agricultural product market, agricultural production restructuring, fluctuation of product price, restructuring of agricultural and rural organizations, polluted natural resources, illegitimate use and management of natural resources, and unreliability in in-put materials supply. However, the institutional assets to appropriately manage the conflicts severely lack.
In the in-depth research, the shortage of the institutional assets available for conflict management, compared with the escalation of social conflicts in both quantitative and qualitative terms, was highlighted: the various formal and informal mechanisms activated in the two conflict cases could not parallel the dynamism of the conflicting issues or actors. The research has derived two policy implications: the need to build up intellectual approaches to take the dynamisms into account, and the need to set up developmental mechanisms for their management.
Relying on the findings above, the study suggests policy alternatives regarding conflict management in the current agricultural sector. They are discerned into ex ante and ex post ones. Among the policy alternatives below, the first two are the ex ante alternatives:
1) The official councils in the government need to be revamped in the way that they empower potential participants and include all related actors in the process. Specific alternatives are to endow societal actors the actual rights to agena-setting and decision-making, to institutionalize the participation of all relevant governmental agencies, and to include all related societal actors into the process as wide as they are concerned.
2) Governmental bodies need to support the constellation of society-centered deliberative mechanisms for societal actors to deal with potential policy problems independently. An alternative is to support societal actors' efforts to improve their specialties in relative areas either on their own or in liaison with related academic groups.
3)Ex ante mechanisms need to be established on the complementary basis to the above two. The needed measures are to accumulate hermeneutic studies on individual cases of social conflicts, and to institutionalize the philosophy and the need of conflict management into related legislations.
Researchers: Hong-Sang Kim and Jae-Mahn Shim
E-mail: hskim@krei.re.kr
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