Seoul (AsiaNews) – Urban sprawl has gobbled up large chunks of South Korea’s agricultural land, and the problem has become so acute that the country’s leaders have had to start leasing farmland abroad.
Nationwide, farmland dropped to an estimated 1.759 million hectares from 2.196 million hectares in 1980, a trend recorded at least since 1970, according to the Ministry for Food, Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries.
In 30 years, the average area of land under cultivation per person has also dwindled, from just under three hectares in 1978 to its current lowest point, just under 1.5 in 2008.
Massive urbanisation is the main cause, a trend that is not likely to change any time soon. “We have recently implemented several massive development projects, such as the Innovation City, Multifunctional Administrative City, and new town projects that have resulted in a decrease in available farmland for the past two to three years,” a ministry official said.
To counter the effects of lost farmland and provide the country with a certain degree of food security, some agribusinesses have leased large estates abroad. One example is Jeonnam Feedstock, which signed a deal with the Philippines to grow wheat on 92,000 hectares in Mindoro Oriental over the next 25 years.
For South Korean agribusinesses, leasing farmland in other countries to grow rice, fruit and vegetables is nothing new; for years, they have been present in countries like Cambodia, Indonesia, Mongolia or Russia.
What is more, shrinking agricultural land is not only affecting the economy; it is also giving rise to new social problems.
As young people prefer living in cities, rural populations age. Already urbanites constitute 80 per cent of the South Korean population of 49 million people.
At the same time, the rural-to-urban exodus is changing the countryside in another, more direct way. With young farmers unable to find local wives, women from other Asian countries like Vietnam and Cambodia move to South Korea. The net effect is that more and more rural families are becoming multicultural, a situation that is generating its own set of problems concerning the education of children, language barriers in the family as well as racial discrimination and social exclusion.
