ABSTRACT
Aside from land reform, agrarian questions have often been slighted in analyses of South Korea’s (hereafter Korea) post-1960 rapid economic growth trajectory. Yet, as Gi-Wook Shin argued in Chapter 1, agriculture has played a critical role in transforming Korean society over the course of the twentieth century. In the post-colonial era, Korean economic growth was intimately tied to agricultural development and state policy. This chapter examines a primary organizational mechanism for Korean intersectoral development linkages, the National Agricultural Cooperative Federation (NACF or nonghyŏp in Korean). Burmeister and colleagues (2002) have shown that organizational infrastructure, namely the NACF, played an instrumental role in connecting over two-and-a-half million small farm households to national markets for agricultural commodities, agro-inputs, consumer goods, and labor. Although direct capital transfers from agriculture to industry via taxation or biased terms of trade were less pronounced in the Korean case than in Japan or Taiwan, significant strategic economic ties were created between agriculture and the rest of the economy that supported the country’s national development project (see Ban et al. 1980: ch. 2; Fei and Ranis 1975; Michell 1988: 31; Oshima 1986: 794–795). Indicators of positive development linkages included higher growth rates for agriculture in Korea than for other middle income oil-importing countries during the period 1960 to 1980 (Hart-Landsberg 1993: 27), and relatively high levels of farm household consumption and educational investment given farm-size constraints (Burmeister 1990: 213–215). A study of NACF organizational development and change thus provides us with a revealing view on major transformations which took place in Korean rural and agricultural society after 1945. This chapter will highlight the relationship between the state and agriculture, and especially the role that the state played in mobilizing rural resources to meet its modernization goals. It will also explore the impact that democratization had on rural institutions, and the challenges faced by farmers and the state in dealing with Korean agriculture in the WTO era.
