This is an impressive piece that informs us that the
consumers and the producers share a common cause that can be harnessed to work
well with both. It still fails to
address the task of liberating capital, but that is likely my task in the
ongoing development of this blog.
How about a local food voucher system to replace a portion
of government transfers including pension payments? It is a thought that unleashes the already
inadequate pension system in a way that drives local production. It is both simple and targeted and can be
addressed to actual increases in pension payouts to avoid those payouts simply
driving the rental market. The whole
thing can be funded by diversion of farm subsidies.
With local demand stabilized, agriculture will then focus
on supporting that demand. I do know
that a $100 per month food voucher that must be spent on locally produced
product does not sound like much but it becomes the elephant in the room in
terms of shoring up proper eating habits.
South Korea: Ground Zero for Food Sovereignty and
Community Resilience
The bustling, fast-paced, wired metropolis city of Seoul
is what most people know of South Korea. Now the 15th largest economy in
the world, South Korea’s economy is driven by the exports sector controlled by
corporations like Samsung, Hyundai, LG, and Daewoo. Thesechaebols have
significant global market share: 37 percent in LCD TVs, 33 percent in hand-held phones,
and 9 percent in automobiles. The term “chaebol nation” aptly describes South
Korea’s economy: the top 30 chaebols account for 82 percent of the
country’s exports.
It’s hard to imagine that just two generations ago,
farming fueled the nation’s economy. In the 1970s, farmers accounted for half
the population; today, they represent only 6.2 percent. South Korea’s rapid
transformation from an agrarian economy to a highly industrialized one wasn’t
accidental; it was the outcome of the central government’s development and
trade liberalization policies that in the early 1980s began to see farming as
part of Korea’s past, not its future.
The major blow to Korean agriculture fell in 1994, when South
Korea joined the WTO and the Agreement on Agriculture, which effectively forced
the government to eliminate quotas and tariffs even while major agriculture
exporting blocs like the United States and European Union still gave billions
in subsidies to their own farmers. The result of all this liberalization: South
Korea is only 20-percent self-sufficient in grain production, compared with the
1970s when it was at 70 percent.
If South Korean chaebols and the politicians
that represent them had their way, small farmers—the majority of South Korea’s
agricultural sector—would all but disappear under the logic that they are
uncompetitive in the global marketplace. They argue that it would be far more
efficient for the country to continue to import cheap food from less developed
countries—including through the process of acquiring land outside of Korea,
like in Africa and South East Asia.
And yet, despite a series of domestic and international
policies that have sought to systematically eliminate them, South Korean
farmers and peasants are fighting back. They have protested the WTO and
bilateral free trade agreements (FTAs) for two decades, inspiring peasant
farmers throughout the global south to mobilize against the free trade regime.
At home, they are trying to build a domestic food sovereignty movement that is
ecologically sustainable, socially equitable, and economically resilient by
producing healthy food, creating dignified rural livelihoods, and reviving
farming communities.
Instead of being blinded by South Korean high-tech bling,
our eyes should be on South Korea’s food sovereignty movement. It offers the
rest of us robust alternatives to the highly consolidated, industrialized,
energy-intensive, and chemical-dependent globalized food systems that dominate
all of our lives.
In August, we co-organized and participated in a Food First Food Sovereignty Tour where we visited South Korea’s leading organic farms
and progressive farmer-consumer cooperatives. South Korea is now a leader in
the Asian region in organic production, so much so that the International Federation
of Organic Agriculture Movements set up its offices there. And while there were many
inspiring organic farms and gardens, two organizations stand out: the Korean
Women Peasants Association (KWPA) and Hansalim.
Korean Women Peasants Association
“The food that is being sold by capitalism is sold as a
commodity instead of food that sustains us,” explained Jeong-Yeol Kim of My
Sister’s Garden, a KWPA project. “That’s why we believe that helping
farmers thrive is the only way to fix this food crisis, and the pathway to do
so would be to ensure that consumers and every citizen join us in the process
of making this come true.”
We visited My Sister’s Garden in the small village of
Bongang, where 14 women peasant farmers collectively grow and distribute a
weekly “gerubi”—similar to a community supported agriculture (CSA)
box—comprised of organic produce they grow and packaged foods they make, such
as pickled radish and pear juice. KWPA operates 26 of these producer
communities throughout the country. On the day we visited, they were packaging
and sending 141 boxes to the Bluebird Children’s Center in the city where parents
come to pick up the boxes. “Children today have no connection to the rural
land,” explains Jeong-Yeol. Unlike previous generations, many children today no
longer have grandparents or relatives living in the countryside who are
connected in any way to farming. “So part of the effort of this partnership is
to expose children to food production.”
According to Jeong-Yeol, My Sister’s Garden plots were
started in response to the devastating impacts of agricultural trade
liberalization on the rural economy. “Just within ten years, 10 percent of
farmers have fled to the cities here in Korea,” she explained. The reason? The
globalized food production system. “We think that the solution to this crisis
is to focus on small-scale farmers and give a solid foundation for each farmer
to survive.” Each farmer takes on 15 consumer households, earning 1,500,000
won—approximately $1,400—per month. When more consumers wish to join, they
encourage a new garden plot to be created so that more women peasant farmers
also can earn a dignified income.
Optimizing profits is not the goal; rather, sharing with
both consumers and other producers is at the center of the project’s
philosophy. They are seeking to bring as many people as possible into an
economically viable and socially just system to reverse the decline of rural
communities. Despite their prevalence in agriculture, Korean peasant women lack
equal rights and opportunities, which makes a project like My Sister’s Garden
an even more important empowered space for peasant women to make decisions on
all aspects of their production and distribution.
In the small village of Uiseong, just a few hours away
from Bongang, KWPA members started a native seed protection program to defend
Korean native seeds against corporate takeover. “A lot of our native seeds are
being bought up or taken by Syngenta or Monsanto. There are no national Korean
domestic seed companies left,” laments Jung-mee Han, a plum, mung bean, rice,
and garlic farmer and member of KWPA.
“We are all farming different crops,” adds Jeong-mi Kim,
president of the Uiseong Native Seed Protectors. “Because we couldn’t take care
of all the seeds ourselves, each member is responsible for preserving and
cultivating several crops.” They also distribute seeds to low-income farmers
who cannot afford them. “We’re not just saving seeds,” explains Jeong-mi. “We
are tracking, monitoring, and sharing seeds among farmers, and nationally, we
sell them to increase consumption of native agriculture.”
These KWPA projects seek to radically alter the structure
of the Korean food system and to de-commodify the linkages between consumers
and producers. It has not been in vain. In 2012, KWPA was awarded with
the Food Sovereignty Prize for their work to defend the rights of small-scale
women farmers in Korea and preserve the cultural heritage of Korean native
seeds.
Hansalim
In 1986, even before farmers’ markets and CSA programs became
popular in the United States, South Korean farmers and consumers began
Hansalim. “Han” in Korean means great, one, whole, and together, and refers to
all living things on earth. “Salim” refers to domestic activities that must be
managed to care for one’s home, family, children, and community, as well as to
revive and give life.
With 2,000 growers and 380,000 consumer members, Hansalim
is among the world’s largest and most successful agricultural cooperatives,
creating an alternative economy that supports organic farmers and local
agriculture, producing healthy food and protecting the environment in the
process. Despite the global financial crisis, its sales have been growing
annually by 20 percent.
“Farmers at the time realized that they would need to
collaborate with consumers in the city,” explains Woon Seok Park, a Hansalim
farmer. “Hansalim was created from that point of view, that consumers and
producers could make a movement that went beyond mere market transactions to
one of understanding each others’ conditions.”
At Hansalim, consumers and growers meet each year to
select what and how much they will produce and deliberate on prices for the
following season. The coordination on such a massive scale—navigating
production, price, harvest, distribution, and processing—is, to say the least,
remarkable.
It deeply impressed one U.S. organic farmer: David Retsky
of County Line Harvest, who reflected back to Hansalim growers, “I come from
California where I am just trying to make my business work. We’re competing
with other people, so for me to see so many producers in the way of a
collective, I’m amazed to see it working quite well.” To further demonstrate
their commitment to support Hansalim farmers, consumers established a product
stabilization fund in case of bad harvests caused by multiple factors,
including rising fuel costs and climate change. Unlike many farmers who have
been forced to throw in the towel in recent years due to extreme weather, which
has caused crop failures, this fund has been a lifeline to Hansalim farmers who
have been able to stay on the farm.
Hansalim farmers know that climate change poses a
challenge to the viability of agriculture in Korea. That’s why “we only handle
local food,” explains Woon Seok, because “using Hansalim products is a way to
combat climate change.” Hansalim doesn’t exclude non-organic growers from the
cooperative. While it encourages organic production, proximity is most
important because of the high environmental costs of shipping food over long
distances, including refrigeration. Hansalim also runs the only livestock feed
factory in Korea that uses only local feed sources from nearby farmers. Unlike
the majority of livestock farmers, Hansalim livestock is therefore not
dependent on feed imports that make up the majority of South Korean grain
imports.
Hansalim also informs consumers about the environmental
benefits of locally produced food. On each product, it lists the distance and
carbon saved by consuming this locally produced good versus one that would have
been imported. To make this figure relevant to the lives of consumers, the
label also lists an equivalent energy savings, such as the number of hours of
electricity used to watch television or to light a fluorescent bulb.’
Replacing Competition with Sharing
Hansalim and KWPA are responses to government policies
that have liberalized Korean agriculture and sacrificed farming to expand
export markets for chaebols. And it’s about to get worse.
South Korea has signed nine bilateral free trade
agreements, and 12 more are under negotiation, including a trilateral one with
China and Japan. The most significant pact is the Korea-U.S. Free Trade Agreement (KORUS FTA), which, after massive protests in South
Korea, passed in 2011. According to Doo Bong Han and Kyung Min Kim of Korea University, under the KORUS FTA, Korean
agriculture will lose $626 million in production value. Estimates by the South
Korean government also predict that 45 percent of Korean farmers will be
displaced under the KORUS FTA.
In recent weeks, South Korea has also signaled its
interest in joining the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the most ambitious free
trade agreement the world has ever seen, which would account for 40 percent of
the world’s economy. If Seoul joins, it would be the fourth largest economy in
the pact, following the United States, Japan, and Australia.
These free trade agreements, it is argued, will strengthen
global demand for the high-tech commodities that constitute the core of South
Korea’s export-oriented economy—and as such, Korean agriculture must either
adapt or perish.
Hansalim and KWPA, however, demonstrate that competition
is not inevitable, necessary, or the only path forward. More than 1 million
households in Korea today are members of cooperatives like Hansalim,
demonstrating the viability and growing interest in alternative food systems.
By stressing instead the concept of sharing and the notion that “consumers and
producers are one,” these cooperatives have shown that a different economy is
possible.
The fate of South Korea’s countryside remains to be seen,
but if history is instructive, we know that Korean peasants have endured and
resisted. In the legendary Donghak rebellion of 1894, peasant farmers rose up
with their bamboo spears against the Chosun King for levying heavy taxes on
them to grow Korea’s industrial might and bolster the monarchy’s power against
foreign invaders like China, Japan, Russia, and the United States. Donghak
peasants were influenced by a philosophy that at its center argued for human
equality, a radical notion during feudalism. The rebellion was quashed with the
help of the Japanese, but the idea that all humans are equal and all living
beings are one prevailed—and continues to inspire today’s social movements.
In Korean folklore, the mung bean, or nokdu, is
symbolic of the resilient spirit of the Korean peasants. In the harshest
conditions, nokdu sprouts and grows, feeding the hungry. In the
face of domestic and international policies that have systematically undermined
their livelihoods and depressed the countryside, Korean peasants and farmers
are sprouting, growing, and inspiring Koreans and global citizens alike by
demonstrating that another economy and food system can thrive—even under the
harsh conditions of corporate trade regimes.
This piece was reprinted by Truthout with permission
or license. It may not be reproduced in any form without permission or license
from the source.
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