Large-scale production did not make South Korea's agriculture rich, but fell into crisis and changed to "people-centered" to promote sustainable agriculture.

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Similar to Japan, agriculture and food culture in Taiwan and South Korea are faced with great challenges in the process of modernization. Wu Hyun-seok, director of the South Korean Agriculture, Fisheries, Agriculture and Fisheries Village Special Committee, came to Taiwan to give a speech, saying that South Korean agriculture takes improving production efficiency as its core goal, and over the past 30 years, South Korea's agricultural policy has adopted a strategy of scale, specialization, intensification, and centralization. Set "agriculture that can compete with imported agricultural products" as the goal, resulting in structural changes.

Wu Hyun-seok said that under productivism, South Korean agriculture has become fragile. South Korea relies on imports for 75% of its food, faced with the opening of global markets in the 1980s, passivated rural growth, reduced overall income, and a shortage of young labor force. from farmers, the proportion of people under 40 years old is less than 1%, and the proportion of people over 60 years old is approaching 60%. At present, animal husbandry still has to face the problem of classical swine fever from North Korea, the supply of food has been affected, and a large amount of fertilizers and pesticides have been invested in agriculture to increase production, leading to over-exploitation and the reduction of biodiversity.

Photo courtesy of Wu Hyun-suk for sustainable, inclusive, innovative improvement of agriculture and fisheries in South Korea

In order to improve the current situation, the current goal of the new agricultural policy is "sustainability, tolerance and innovation". The Special Committee on Agriculture, Fisheries, Agriculture and fishing villages to which Wu Xuanxi belongs belongs directly to the President and was established in April this year. The goal is to promote the transformation of agriculture and fisheries and agricultural and fishing villages, and to shorten the gap with urban income, the aging of agricultural and fishing villages and other issues, about 30 people It includes the Minister of Planning and Finance, the Minister of Agriculture, Forestry, Animal products and Food, the Minister of Marine Fisheries, the Director of Food, Medicine and Drug Safety, as well as representatives of the agriculture and fisheries industry, citizens and consumers, academia and other experts.

Wu Xuanxi explains that the development of cities and agricultural and fishing villages is polarized, so efforts should be made to reduce the gap between the two, such as using insurance benefits to increase the wages of vulnerable groups in agricultural and fishing villages. in the future, it will also increase the space for public construction and improvement in agricultural and fishing villages and set up food plans to ensure national food security.

Photo courtesy of / Wu Xuanxi

"people-centered" to formulate a sustainable plan

In the part of sustainability, people-centered planning will be made. Wu Hsien-hsi explains that the new type of farmers, such as women farmers, small farmers, foreign immigrants, and so on, will also consider how to assist; and in terms of energy transformation and food planning, it will extend to other businesses. He adds that in the future, the central government will only be responsible for the provision of budgets, while detailed plans will be implemented by local governments.

There are also special committees responsible for other rural issues, such as the Youth Hope Committee for Agricultural and fishing villages, which aims to retain the talents of young farmers and fishermen, and the North-South Cooperation Committee on Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries, which constructs a North-South cooperation system.

Agriculture in Taiwan, Japan and South Korea is facing the problem of sustainability. The South Korean government supports agricultural development, and other sectors of society also oppose it. Wu Hyun-hsi believes that if people can be persuaded from the perspective of ecological environment, it can be easily solved. In recent years, the proportion of farmers in South Korea has increased, but young farmers often have to be subsidized for several years before they can continue to move on. Wu Hyun-suk says he hopes to improve the system through legalization in the next two years.

Photo courtesy / Wu Hyun-suk Korean diet change, citizens and farmers save themselves

In addition to agriculture and fisheries facing similar problems with Taiwan and Japan, South Korea's diet structure is also facing the same crisis. Guo Jinshun, a member of the Agriculture, Fisheries, Agriculture and Fisheries Village Special Committee, explained that South Korea's grain self-sufficiency rate is only 49%. Among them, the grain self-sufficiency rate has dropped to 23%, the proportion of domestic skipping breakfast and inadequate nutrition intake has also increased year by year, and the incidence rate of chronic diseases has also increased year by year.

In South Korea, citizens from all over the country began to do various social movements to protect agricultural food a long time ago, such as: the preservation of local wheat seeds in Daping Village, Shanchuan County, southern Shaanxi, and finally expanded into a movement to protect local seeds; farmers have established the Association of Environmental Protection Agricultural production and consumption groups (hereinafter referred to as the Health Association) since 1994 to promote the government to formulate laws related to environment-friendly agriculture and fisheries and implement a friendly environmental certification system.

With regard to the Health Association, Guo Jinshun further explained that farmers were afraid that agriculture would disappear in South Korea, so they launched a peasant movement, and every year thousands of farmers died as a result of inhaling a large amount of harmful substances in the agricultural law, so they went on to promote friendly agriculture. in the process of their respective initiatives, they realized that agricultural problems could only be solved through the cooperation of producers and consumers, and therefore producers and consumers jointly established health associations.

Guo Jinshun (Photo / Lin Yijun), member of the Special Committee on Agriculture, Fisheries, Agriculture and fishing villages in South Korea, the construction of a food safety net: food and education should not be slack off.

At present, in the Special Committee on Agriculture, Fisheries, Agriculture and Fisheries Village, the food policy externally hopes to establish a safety net for food in East Asia, while internally, it wants to protect the basic rights of food in various regions and promote local food. taking into account the carbon mileage of food, environmentally friendly food production, and the symbiosis of urban and rural areas.

Food plans vary from place to place. Guo Jinshun, for example, the mayor of Seoul has proposed urban-rural cooperation, providing public meals, mediating production areas with cities, and combining producing areas with cities. She also mentioned that the surplus ingredients of nutritious lunch in South Korea are very serious, maybe not.