Rice Paddies Yielding to Other Cash Crops
By Kim Hyun-cheol
Staff Reporter
Rice paddies are dwindling very quickly, as farmers are giving up rice to grow other cash crops.
Last year, a total of 21,324 hectares of rice paddies were converted for other crops, with only 5,798 hectares of land being newly used as rice paddies, according to the Ministry of Food, Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries Wednesday. One hectare is equivalent to about 10,000 square meters.
The conversion trend has been marked for the past couple of years, mainly on account of profitability, the ministry said.
``A lot of farmers have set up greenhouses on land they used to grow rice,'' an official of the ministry said.
Even though overall farming land size has been shrinking recently, the pace is much faster among rice paddies than land used for any other type of crop. The year-on-year drop is increasing, having reached 23.9 percent last year.
This change is taking place due to a productivity surge in rice farming through industrialization despite dietary habits of Koreans being diverted from rice. Koreans consumed an annual average 106.5 kilograms of rice in 1995, but the figure dropped to 93.6 kilograms in 2000, and the downward trend has gained speed in recent years.
``Koreans' rice consumption is still higher than that of other Eastern Asian countries like Japan or Taiwan, but it is obvious that it will keep falling for years,'' said Kim Young-hwa, a researcher at the Rural Research Institute.
The government has recently encouraged the expansion of a greater variety of crops via subsidies.