Revival of rural economy

By Mark Peterson

I wrote in November of a trip to visit a traditional village in the rural countryside. I was quite pessimistic and titled my article, "Death of Korea's Villages." Today I'm going to write about the opposite phenomenon. I recently visited Wando and Gangjin on the south coast of Korea to find they are thriving rural communities.

What was the difference? Aquaculture. Farming at sea.

I was guided around Wando and Gangjin by a man who has helped develop aquaculture in the area, Dr. Yi Young-ho. He has a Ph.D. in fisheries science from Pusan Fisheries University, but his high school was in his hometown of Wando, The Wando Fisheries High School. He has worked in the state-run fisheries advisory agencies and set up several research stations in the area. But his most influential work was as a National Assemblyman, in the 17th National Assembly at the time of Roh Moo-hyun.

As we visited various research centers, farmers' advisory centers, and aquafarms, I was surprised how everybody knew him and greeted him so cheerfully and with obvious appreciation. For example we visited an abalone hatchery. It was on land, and in a large building, covered with a translucent ceiling, enclosing several large tanks, each about three feet deep. There was fresh seawater running throughout the whole place. There I saw tiny, tiny abalone, each about an eighth of an inch long. They were a radiant green color and you could see the moving organism on the inner side of the top shell. I found that the baby abalone would be sold to sea farms when they got to be about a half-inch to one-inch in size. The sea farmers would then take the hatchlings out to sea ― to one of the floating sea farms that dotted, even clogged, the bay.

We visited an abalone processing plant that buys full-grown abalone and cans them, or places them in plastic packaging that can be shipped to Seoul or Japan or anywhere. There we snacked on abalone that had been cooked and was tender, in a kind of soy-sauce.

We saw other aquafarms that raise various kinds of seaweed ― miyuk and gim and other varieties.

And we visited a research center that provided support and technical advice to new farmers who want to farm clams ― like the kind we see in doenjang-jjigye and other soups. There they explained that people were moving from the cities and returning to the land.

This was the opposite of what I wrote about in November. There, villages were dying as measured by students in school, for example. Where the school would hold 140 students, but there were only 11 students. But not so in Wando and Gangjin. This is the opposite perception from that of the traditional yangban culture of Korea where aristocrats live in the plains on the edge of the hills but the islands and coastal areas are for the outcasts of society. Now the yangban villages are dying and the coastal areas are prospering. The coastal people did explain however, that their region was once the area where people were sent when they were banished from Seoul ― the most famous case in Gangjin was that of Jeong Yag-yong, one of the most famous scholar-officials banished from the court. The case is famous not only because he was a great scholar, but because while he was in exile, he wrote one of the largest and most famous books in Korea ― his criticism of society and his views on philosophy. There is a sign on the highway pointing out the way to where his house in exile is located.

In all of my discoveries the common thread of shining hope for prosperity on the coastline was Dr. Yi. He was directly involved in many of the projects we saw. It was the kind of things he studied in school, that he worked on in his career and he influenced to get built when he was in the National Assembly. He is a walking encyclopedia. On several occasions when he was talking about the specifics of one of the projects, he would quote, off the top of his head, lists of statistic and other data about the increase in production of abalone or gim. He quoted one statistic that explained how Korea, once an importer of rice is now an exporter of rice ― the secret is Koreans eat less rice! As their diet has diversified, proteins and other carbohydrates have replaced rice. And he told me how many grams per day Koreans once ate and how much less they eat now.

And the sweetest, literally sweetest, discovery of all was a fruit he personally farms. I have never seen it before, but it was wonderful ― in Korean it's bipa ― in English "loquat." It's like an apricot, but only grows in coastal areas of Korea, Japan, China and Italy and a few other places.

Dr. Yi is a national treasure. One day he will be the head of Ministry for Food, Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries. He has done a great service to his home area, but I think he has much more to give to the nation in the future.

Mark Peterson (markpeterson@byu.edu) is professor emeritus of Korean, Asian and Near Eastern languages at Brigham Young University in Utah.

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