Students activity for agricultural problem in Korea
Minji PARK
Kyungpook National University of Agriculture
In 1970~1980, Korea faced with industrialization. Urbanization has rapidly spread out which brought high added value industry such as secondary and tertiary industries. Therefore, movement of rural population to urban had increased. Owing to this phenomenon, agricultural encountered with various kinds of problems such as lack of workforce. Moreover the problem also happened in urban. Overpopulation, concentration of industry caused house, traffic and water problem and all sorts of pollution. To solve these problems what can students can do? I though of two broad way, for rural and for urban.
First, volunteer activities for rural communities. Second, students can do urban agriculture. So I will look what actually activities they are doing in the school or in Korea.
Recently, vegetable garden or Weekend farm has increased in the urban community. Through urban agriculture, farming is not only for food industry but also for high quality of citizen’s life in health, environmental improvement, education and recovery of community. To spread out these things, I found a related activity in Kyungpookuniversity called “Hope Village”. This activity is doing cooperative farming, crop donation to spread urban agriculture. Since this activity held in 2011, its size is getting larger in these days.
The domestic number of farmhouse is decreasing compared to 10years ago. Also, the population over 65years old is 51.3% according to 2012 statics, so the workforce in rural is running short. To solve this, students are doing volunteer for rural communities through student council. But recently students are not positive of this activity. Therefore Ministry of agriculture held ‘Smile talent Bank’ program. This program connect the students in private or group who want to volunteer for the rural community. Also rural culture is poor compared to urban, so Ministry of culture made ‘Culture Delivery’ program. These two programs make students do the volunteer and get their SPEC for career at the same time.