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South Korean farmers mourn their WTO `martyr'

Mourners carry the coffin of Lee Kyung-Hae near Seoul, yesterday. PHOTO: AFP

When Lee Kyung-hae, fresh out of college in Seoul, returned to his rural hometown in southern South Korea to become a farmer in 1975, he may have sown the seed of his own destruction.

South Korea, once an agrarian country, had just begun its rapid industrialization. The young and bright joined Samsung, Hyundai and other big companies that built cars, oil tankers and computer chips for export.

While the country's manufacturing industries benefited from global trade, farmers grappled with rising imports, plummeting prices and snowballing debt.

Lee was once a star farmer. His experimental 7.28 hectare farm attracted students who wanted to learn how to yield more with less cost and survive declining prices. He won numerous government awards, and his farm was once featured on national television.

But he, too, became overwhelmed with the problems other farmers were facing.

Last week, Lee's self-styled campaign to defend Korean farmers from free trade came to a tragic end. During a protest outside a WTO meeting in Cancun, Mexico, on Sept. 10, he fatally struck a knife into his heart after shouting "WTO kills farmers!"

Lee's desperate act shocked the country and dramatized the plight of its debt-ridden farmers struggling to maintain their centuries-old agrarian tradition while the world's 12th largest economy finds its farm sector increasingly succumbing to demands for free trade.

On Thursday, 600 black-clad farmers gathered in the rain at an airport outside Seoul to receive the body of a "martyr." They draped Lee's coffin with a national flag. Lee's sobbing daughter Jie-hye said her father "died to keep the Korean farm industry alive."

"Mr. Lee killed himself to show that Korean farmers are on the brink of a cliff," said Suh Jong-eui, chairman of the Korean Advanced Farmers Federation, a farmers' lobby that Lee had once headed.

"He died on behalf of all small farmers around the world who suffer in the name of the market economy and free trade," Suh said.

Soon after Lee's death, the 146-nation meeting in Cancun collapsed over differences between developing countries and rich nations over how to open agricultural markets.

South Korea sided with developing countries, but it admits that liberalization is inevitable.

The government protects its farmers by imposing 100 percent or more tariffs on imports of 142 farm products. It imposes a virtual ban on rice imports. It also buys huge stocks of domestic rice at high prices. As a result, South Koreans pay four times more for rice than the average US consumer does.

But globalization cannot be ignored.

To keep overseas markets open for its economy, South Korea slowly began to reduce the subsidies and started opening the doors on food imports in the late 1980s.

In response, farmers, usually the most docile segment of Korean society, began taking to the streets even as their numbers dwindled. Today, there are only 3.6 million farmers compared to 6.6 million 12 year ago in a country of 47 million.

"I wonder more than a dozen times a day whether it is possible to be a farmer in South Korea any longer," said Ham Jung-hwan, a student at Korean National Agriculture College. "Many classmates are leaving school before graduation."

In South Korea, the farm industry -- especially rice, which accounts for 52 percent of the farm products -- has always been more than a trade issue.

The concept of "grain security" -- self-sufficiency in growing rice and other food stuff -- has a strong emotional pull among Koreans.

In a letter to the WTO in March, Lee lamented that open markets were destroying "our lovely rural communities," driving farmers into city slums, and turning rural areas into ghost villages where "pig pens are empty and only immobile old people live."
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