hankyoreh

He was not wearing a mask or a bandana. Since he had been baptized as Emmanuel in the Catholic Church, he obviously was not from the Islamic State (IS). But even so, he was knocked out by the blast of a police-wielded water cannon on Nov. 14. Two weeks later, he is still in a coma.
Baek Nam-gi is a farmer who is nearly 70 years old. He had come all the way to Seoul, and I wondered what it was he had wanted to say.
I visited his empty house in Boseong County, South Jeolla Province. There was no main gate or low stone wall around the house.
The courtyard and backyard were tidy. His neighbors credited this to his industriousness - they call him the “weed whacker whiz.”
Beneath the eaves of his house, I saw a small bronze plaque that said, “Person of National Merit.” This was a tribute to the hard work he had done while a university student in the 1970s.
In his room, three children - today, all grown up - are beaming from pictures taken on their 100th days.
On the day of the protest, Baek left his house at dawn.
With the harvest complete, the farmers of Boseong County boarded three buses and came to Seoul to do a demonstration they call “asphalt farming.”
There was an oppressive mood in the bus. The farmers were perplexed about what to

The home of farmer Baek Nam-gi in South Jeolla Province

do about the price of rice, which continued to fall after three years of bumper crops.

They were fretful about efforts to ratify South Korea’s free trade agreement with China and to join the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which were entering their final stages.

Baek, who has been in agriculture for 30 years, entered the cattle business in the mid-1980s. When he first started farming, he took out loans at 15% to 20% interest to purchase cattle.

Things were not easy. As a glut in the market drove down the price of beef, Baek ran up around 100 million won (US$86,600) in debt.

Even today, he is still paying off that debt. All he could do was refinance the debt by mortgaging his farmland, which got him a lower interest rate.

Baek grows rice, wheat, and soybeans with his 32-year-old son, who has agreed to take over the farm from him. No wonder that Baek is so concerned about life on the farm and the future of agriculture.

Marching down the street with the other farmers, Baek called on President Park Geun-hye to fulfill her campaign pledges. Park had promised to keep the price of an 80kg sack of rice around 210,000 won (US$180). But the price has nosedived from 170,000 won in 2013 to 150,000 won today.

In fact, the price of rice at harvest has continued to fall. At the Yanggok Wholesale Rice Market, 20kg of rice was 44,000 won in 2012, 43,000 won in 2013, and 41,000 in 2014. As of Nov. 26, the price was down to 36,000 won, and there are even bigger bargains, with rice going for as low as 29,500 won.

Apprehensive farmers proposed giving some of the rice reserves - currently amounting to 2 million tons - as aid to North Korea. They explained that providing the aid would be beneficial since it would stabilize the price of rice and North Korea could provide crops or minerals in exchange.

But there has been no response whatsoever from the government. Despite the volatility of rice prices, the government has only increased farmers’ worries by allowing more rice to be imported from the US and China.

The position of the government is that falling rice prices are not harmful to farmers. Incomes remain steady, the government says, since the government picks up the difference if the price falls below the target of 188,000 won per 80kg.

The government has also tried to change the subject by claiming that it invested nearly 200 trillion won (US$171.8 billion) in minimizing damage to farmers in the process of liberalizing the farming business.

Baek and the farmers protest that they only make 30 million won a year from their farms. Government subsidies only go so far, and lower prices of rice naturally result in less income.

The talk about money spent to compensate for damages is just window dressing, since there has been no big increase in the farming budget. Even that, farmers say, has been aimed at developing farming villages and large-scale farming operations, which has not helped the income of small-scale farmers.

Time and time again, the government has called on farmers to make sacrifices while opening up the market, but it has never sat down with them beforehand to ask their approval for relief measures. Farmers are hurt at being ignored now that their numbers have decreased from 10 million to 3 million.

That is what Baek came to Seoul to say on the day of the protest. But there is no country for old farmers.

The water cannons are back. Apparently unwilling to listen, the government is not even allowing a second protest to take place on Dec. 5.

By Ahn Kwan-ok, Gwangju correspondent

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