Background and Purpose
This study aims to identify development consultation projects—Korean Agricultural Policy Experiences for Food Security (KAPEX), for the Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs (MAFRA). Major research activities include: i) selecting KAPEX target countries and receiving project proposals; ii) choosing preliminary projects from the proposals; iii) finalizing new projects; and iv) undertaking a pre-feasibility study for each proposal.

Research Methodology
The study adopts research methods such as surveys for candidate countries for receiving project proposals and research commissioned to local experts for feasibility tests. Asking external experts for research is essential in this study as it is almost impossible to make in-person visits to target countries because of COVID-19.

Key Findings
Four countries of seven participating in the Third ODA Round Table Conference in October 2019 and the Global ODA Forum on Sustainable Agriculture in October 2019—both held in Seoul—suggested ten project proposals in total.
Apart from them, to get more proposals, we sent survey questionnaires to countries on the Korean government’s prioritized country list for its development cooperation policy, as well as the countries selected as potential cooperation partners in the agricultural sector through the research project (the Establishment of Agricultural Development Cooperation Strategy for Focus Countries), undertaken by the Korea Rural Economic Institute (KREI). As a result, we selected seven proposals from five countries.
To choose preliminary projects, the study team applied three criteria toward each proposal: linkage with the Korean government’s cooperation policy or strategy, the appropriateness of project topics, and potentials for future ODA projects.
After in-depth discussions with MAFRA officials and in consideration of the possibility of getting the Project Concept Paper (PCP) from each country’s authority concerned on time, which is an essential requirement set by the Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs, five proposals were selected: adminstration, testing, and monitoring of imported pesticides in the Kyrgyz Republic, Paraguay’s effort to strengthen competitiveness in the agricultural and forestry sector, Vietnam’s ICT application for the development of the fruit and vegetable sector in response to COVID-19, Cambodia’s rural economic development through capacity building and integrated farming promotion, and the Philippines’ animal disease profiling program.
We requested experts residing in those target countries to perform pre-feasibility studies for the project proposals. We examined their reports and submitted the execution planning report for each proposal to MAFRA.


Researchers: Heo Jang, Kim Jongsun, Cha Wonkyu, Lee Hyojung, Cho Sunmee, Choi Jungman, Lee Mina, Joo Kyeonghun
Research period: 2021. 1. ∼ 2021. 3.
E-mail address: heojang@krei.re.kr