The Legacy of Lee Kyung Hae

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.