ABSTRACT
South Korea’s food export industry will necessarily be modest, because of the increased domestic requirements occasioned by a greatly enlarged population. The Japanese found that landlordism was a convenient device for furthering their own principal interests in Korean agriculture, which no doubt accounts, in part at least, for the lack of interest in reform. The effects of the diversion of nitrates and sulphates from fertilizer production by the Japanese during the war years were evident as early as the 1944 harvest. The new constitution of the Republic of Korea subsequently passed by the National Assembly stated that, “farmland shall be distributed to self-tilling farmers. Freed from regulation, farmers indulged in making rice wine and candy, which the Japanese had prohibited, and consequently marketed less of their crops. Land reform was assuredly no economic panacea; the permanent relief of Korean agriculture can come only from increasing industrialization which will gradually reduce the pressure upon the land.
