Environmental characteristics of urban-rural farming migrants in the Republic of Korea and their significance for rural sustainability

ABSTRACT

The number of households migrating to agricultural villages has sharply increased in the Republic of Korea (South Korea) since the late 1990s when the Asian economic crisis developed. This study investigates the environmental behaviour and the socio-economic characteristics of urban-rural migrant farming households and provides insights into their significance for rural sustainability in South Korea. The study is based on survey data collected in 2016 from a sample of 166 migrant farming households and 46 native farming households from the Namwon region in South Korea. The migrant farming households are divided into 29 return and 137 non-return farming households. It was found that most non-return migrants are organic farmers, and can be characterised as anti-urban, amenity-pursuing, green, and lifestyle migrants. It is no wonder that they have a strong intent to make their new home an environmentally, socially and economically sustainable place for their children. Thus, appropriate policy measures need to be designed in such a way to facilitate the synergy between the repopulation of rural areas by farming migrants, their uptake of organic farming, their active engagement in community rebuilding, and regional economic development.

KEYWORDS:

• Rural natives
• non-return migrants
• organic farming
• lifestyle migration
• community building

Acknowledgements

The author is grateful to those farming households who participated in the interviews and questionnaire survey. The author would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for their critical and constructive comments on an earlier version of this paper. The author also thanks Mr Gwui-Seop Lee for his enormous assistance in conducting the survey.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Jungho Suh http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9580-6327

Notes

1 Urban-rural migration in South Korea until the late 1990s was negligible, albeit being extant even in the 1970s (Lee 1966).

2 An anonymous return migrant farmer stated “I don’t like being called a migrant. I just came back to my hometown. I have been well acquainted with most native farmers in this village. I am a kind of a native farmer”.

3 KR₩1000 is converted into US$0.90, or US$1 is equivalent to approximately KR₩1116 as of October 2016. The nominal GDP per capita of South Korea was KR₩30.9 M in 2015.

4 Cooperative organic farming is workable in a country where small-scale farmers are dominant (Suh 2015). Indeed, South Korean agriculture can be characterised by small-scale farming. The number of farming households cultivating more than 3.0 ha in South Korea accounted for less than 1.0% of the total farming households of 1.1 million in 2014 (MAFRA 2015b).

Additional information

Funding

This study was supported by the Academy of Korean Studies under a Research Grant [AKS-2015-R17].