○ The Korea Rural Economic Institute has conducted the annual national survey on Korean people’s awareness of rural industry and community, for two months from October 2009. This survey is carried out at the end of every year. For this year, they tried to understand more comprehensive and balanced public opinions regarding rural industry and community by adding expert groups for the first time to the existing survey targets including rural and urban residents.
○ In this survey, 2,470 people including 1,500 urban residents, 906 farmers and 64 experts participated, and these respondents consented on value and necessity for awareness of rural industry and community, however, they also expressed different policy directions and expectations according to their different interests for each group.
○ Positive indicators for people’s awareness on rural life and farmer’s view on their occupations are continuing to improve since 2002, however, visions of agricultural industry and rural life stay around 20%, which is 10-20%p lower than urban residents or experts’ hope indicator. This means that we need to develop a vision that can resolve uncertainty of farmers and that can make them to plan future.
○ Farmers and experts selected development in food industry like globalization of Korean food as the most achieved policy among agricultural policies that the Government focused in 2009, and the least achieved policy as the rural family business stabilization policy. Issue of reorganizing the Agricultural Cooperatives, which became a social issue, is analyzed differently, thus, we expect public opinions can be changed in accordance with future promotions and situations.
○ For agricultural policies that require more investments, agricultural people chose support in pension and expanding direct payment scheme, while experts preferred investments focused on essential and long-term countermeasures like agricultural product stability and development of succeeding workforces. Yet, both farmers and experts selected investment in the policy that sizes farms for full-time farmers should be reduced.
○ About six people out of ten urban residents (62.5%) trust safety of Korean agricultural products and their awareness that Korean agricultural products are safer than foreign products achieved 83.8%, which shows they support Korean products highly. Urban residents, who have intentions to go back to the soil was 53.5%, which is decreasing, and the most worrisome aspect when they return to farm was found out to be securing income sources.
○ About satisfaction in residential environment and quality of life, disparity between urban and rural residents still did not decrease and was found to be 19.4%p, 7.5%p, which shows similar gap compared to the last year. However, both group’s positive awareness is increasing every year.
○ Through this survey, we realized that people’s supports on agricultural industry and rural regions are still very high, but there is a clear distinct of awareness between rural people, urban residents and expert groups about specific agricultural policies, which means we need monitoring and policies that take these differences into account.