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The agricultural proportion in Korea’s total economy has been on a gradual decline due to various poor conditions in the rural area, and due to lower growth, rate in agricultural sector and increasingly declining structure of agricultural industry, the degree of self-sufficiency has been declining in the agricultural sector of which major function is ensuring sufficient supply of food. As a result, we are faced with a grim reality with a serious issue of how to solve the problem of food supply. It is more so due to several additional reasons. The agricultural industry has lost its vitality. The loss of active labour force, male and female, increasingly leaving their rural community for urban life, has aggravated the situation. The rapid expansion of urban areas has decreased the size of available land and all these factors resulted in weakening international competitiveness in the agricultural sector. Even though importing the shortage of grains could be one of the solutions to the issue, we have already experienced several times in the past that the import itself, except in the case of good harvests by the producing nations, is likely to impose a lot of difficulties on the importers when the producers suffer from poor yields due to unusual, climatic changes. Taking all these factors into consideration, we are in desparate need of adopting a policy to protect the agricultural sector and to limit the level of agricultural import as minimal as possible. Meanwhile, every efforts should be exerted to ensure increase of our agricultural production, while there is no other alternatives than depending on imports until1 we achieve the level of self-sufficiency. The policies to protect agricultural industry could include the following ones : introduction of new farming skills, improvement of farming methods, increase of agricultural base, encouragement of farming mechanization in order to meet the labour shortage, reduction of production costs, and the price policy for reflecting the production costs plus an adequate amount of extra gains. In need also is the policy to prohibit any transformation of farming land into other purposes for housing areas, apartment complexes, factory sites, constructions sites for public office buildings, and etc. All these policies are in greater need because our country, in long confrontation between the North and South, has been in shortage of total grain supply by about fifty percent and thus has been dependent on imports of agricultural products. Expansion of farming land by such projects as land reclamation and land clearing is in urgent, greater need in the areas where farming would be possible after such works completed. This type of projects, because they are beyond the farmers’ capability, should be carried out by the government. The result of this study calls for restricting agricultural imports as much as possible, and continuing government’s supports and subsidies by strengthening our agricultural policies. Such policies may include prevention of the continued decline of self-sufficiency of grain supply and the decrease rate of rural population; less use of foreign currency for importing grains; preparing countermeasures against any possible situation of poor harvest which might be caused by unusual climatic changes ; prevention of excessive de-population in the rural and over-population in the urban areas ; and how to help the farmers keep their income from further declining and maintain their effective demand for the general goods.
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