Sustainable farming, rural revitalization bind Korea, Japan, China

Korean Minister of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs Song Mi-ryung, center, poses with Japanese Minister of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries Shinjiro Koizumi, left, and Chinese Minister of Agriculture and Rural Affairs Han Jun ahead of their trilateral meeting in Incheon, Monday. Courtesy of Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs

INCHEON — Korea, Japan and China have agreed to work together to introduce and promote sustainable farming practices and revitalize rural areas facing population aging and workforce shortages as the countries’ agriculture ministers met on Monday.

The trilateral ministerial meeting, the fourth of its kind, was attended by Korean Minister of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs Song Mi-ryung, Japanese Minister of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries Shinjiro Koizumi and Chinese Minister of Agriculture and Rural Affairs Han Jun.

They issued a joint statement at the event, which was held on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Food Security Ministerial Meeting that concluded its two-day run on Sunday, committing to cooperation in key areas.

“The three countries have met for the first time in seven years after COVID-19’s global holdup, facing common challenges, including the climate change, unstable food supply chains and rural industries at a crossroads due to the aging workforce and needs for digital transformation. These are key issues we all must work together to solve,” Song said during a media briefing.

Koizumi said the three countries all experience the Asian monsoon weather system and share similar climate challenges, adding that the joint statement was timely and will help realize a sustainable food system. He said the trilateral initiative should serve as an example for the rest of the world.

“Our trilateral cooperation has so far touched on common challenges like prevention of animal diseases, preservation of endangered natural food sources like eel and exchanging young talents. These are also efforts to protect the traditional values of agriculture,” the Japanese minister said.

Visitors browse a spiral smart farm garden at the 2024 Agri Expo Korea at aT Center in Seoul, Sept. 5, 2024. Newsis

Han said the latest trilateral meeting was important for sharing best practices from the three countries. He added the meeting has further cemented the three countries as an East Asian cooperative on the back of the ninth trilateral summit which was held in May last year in Seoul.

“The three countries’ trades in the agricultural fields have been on the rise, reaching $19.34 billion in value last year,” Han said. “But global geopolitics is becoming more complicated and climate change is intensifying. Working populations across farmlands in all three countries are aging. To tackle these issues, trilateral cooperation is now back to business. Our fields of partnership will diversify from traditional sectors like disease prevention and agricultural development to smart farming and digital transformation.”

The joint statement, also contributed to by the Trilateral Cooperation Secretariat (TCS), specified unstable grain markets and climate change as common threats to the global food supply.

It stated that the three countries will regularly hold meetings to raise early warnings on transnational diseases like foot-and-mouth disease, African swine fever and the highly pathogenic avian influenza. Policies for rice paddy water management, low-methane feed and agricultural solar power were marked for exchange, and artificial intelligence, sensors and automated agricultural machinery were raised as key technologies to explore jointly.

The statement also said the three countries will continue their commitment to the ASEAN Plus Three Emergency Rice Reserve in response to food crises, as well as the annual Trilateral Young Rural Leader’s Exchange Program (TREP) which was launched in 2023.

“The world is seeing uncertain global orders, geopolitical conflicts, wars, climate change and aging societies. The United States’ Donald Trump administration has slapped on all-around tariff measures and fueled trade protectionism, generating major challenges for the three countries,” said Lee Hee-sup, TCS secretary general, who joined the meeting.

He added, “Rural revitalization has now become one of the key conditions to determine a country’s future competitiveness. TCS has been running TREP and the opening video for the meeting includes scenes of participants of the program for the past three years in China’s Anhui province, Korea’s North Jeolla Province and Japan’s Chiba Prefecture. This year will see the program launched in China’s Yunnan province.”

The next trilateral meeting takes place in Japan, though the date has yet to be finalized.

Monday’s trilateral meeting follows the first such meeting on Jeju Island in 2012, the second in Tokyo in 2015 and the third in Beijing in 2018.