| In this photo from December 2020, foreign laborers work in a lettuce field in Yecheon County, North Gyeongsang Province. These workers account for a major part of the agricultural industry's labor force in Korea. Korea Times file |
Aging societies push local gov'ts to seek city farmers, automation
By Ko Dong-hwan
Eumseong County in North Chungcheong Province launched earlier this year a new campaign to recruit city farmers. The measure came as the inland local government in central Korea expressed concerns that there would be not enough working hands to attend to harvesting, distributing and selling the region's agricultural produce unless the authority makes moves to address the labor shortage this year.
The government needed at least 156 able-bodied men or women who are aged between 20 and 75. The officials could not idly sit behind their desks and wait for volunteers given the dire situation; they visited local universities and community centers to recruit students and residents. They also contacted the governments of the county's neighboring cities of Icheon, Anseong and Yeoju and asked to promote the campaign so that interested residents could come to Eumseong.
The campaign was successful. As of Feb. 9, it has recruited 170 people.
Behind the success, Eumseong government raised existing subsidies for participating workers and the farms that would employ them. The workers, after 16 hours of pre-job training this month, start working from March. Farms will pay the employees 60 thousand won ($48) for every four hours they work. The country government will subsidize the farms with 40 percent of the wage. Over 210 million won has been invested by the authority in this campaign to support the farms' wage payouts and the laborers' miscellaneous costs including daily public transit fares, accident insurance coverage fees and training participation fees.
“This new recruit campaign we started for the first time will hopefully begin to operate smoothly soon,” Eumseong Mayor Jo Byung-ok said. “And it will start providing us with the manpower we need every year.”
Eumseong is one of many local jurisdictions in the countryside of Korea that are right now wrestling with the same problem. With the winter almost over, the time to cultivate the thawing fields and feed livestock outside their pens has come near. It means workers are in high demand now. But in this aging country with an extremely low birthrate, farmhands are hard to find. Especially in rural communities where young workers are highly valued but increasingly choose to relocate to urban settings for different opportunities.
| In these photos from a test conducted from 2020 until 2022, Jeju Special Self-Governing Provincial Government checks how well a new machine works for sowing (left) and harvesting garlic fields. The government plans to deploy the machines this year. Courtesy of Jeju Special Self-Governing Provincial Government |
The dwindling workforce is putting pressure on farmers ― and more heavily on local governments that must sustain their communities' businesses.
So the quest to recruit new workers has begun all across the country's rural regions. And, like Eumseong, their efforts are yielding various results.
Jeju Special Self-Governing Province has resorted to machinery to complement human labor. To keep the island's garlic farming going, the provincial government on Monday announced they will deploy specially designed machines to automate crop processing. Western Agricultural Technology Center, run by the provincial government, said the machines will be deployed in the sowing and harvesting stages for now, which require the highest number of laborers in the six-step farming process.
The government gave 132 million won in subsidies to farms interested in using the machines. Farmers must still cover 48 million won of the cost themselves. The new technology's efficiency has already been verified through the tests conducted during 2020-22. While sowing and harvesting, the machines had proved to save 82 percent and 70 percent of human labor, respectively. The automation also saved time spent throughout the entire process by 83 percent in a test conducted on a 10-hectare-large sample field.
“Because of an unstable supply of human labor and a lack of automation, garlic farmers in Jeju haven't been able to expand their farms further to the extent they wanted,” Lee Seong-don, a farming instructor from the farming tech center, said. “The latest addition of automation feature will lighten the burden on our local farms that continue to struggle to secure enough laborers.”
The city of Yeongju in North Gyeongsang Province is in the process of negotiating terms of an agreement with Angeles City in the Philippines to recruit local personnel from the Southeast Asian country to work in Korea. The deal is expected to wrap up later this month. A total of 190 seasonal migrant workers are expected to come to Seoul in March.
| In December 2022, Andong City Mayor Kwon Gi-chang, right on front row, visited Ministry of Labor and Social Welfare in Laos to sign a MOU to invite Laotians to Korea as seasonal agricultural workers. Korea Times file |
This kind of partnership-building hints at how a number of Korean rural communities suffering from worker shortages could now supply and stabilize the workforce from overseas. Iksan in North Jeolla Province put into practice the same measure last December, signing a MOU with a city in Vietnam to recruit over 350 local Vietnamese to work in the Korean city this year. So did Andong City with Laos last December and Yecheon County with Vietnam's Yen Binh District in Yen Bai Province in April 2022.
To attract more local laborers domestically, Yeongju last year introduced an employment agency to bridge available workers to those agricultural businesses that are short of hands. Last year, the agency connected 9,700 applicants with 1,800 different farms. The city, with help of the provincial government, is launching a second agency this year.
There are similar agencies in Iksan as well, which is now looking to add a fifth one this year to replenish the workers for the city's local agricultural producers. Last year, the agencies drew over 23 thousand people from across the city. It expects the pool to reach 30 thousand with the help of the new agency.
Another successful initiative of Yeongju the previous year was starting a “farm-helping challenge” through volunteer groups and private institutions. It had attracted 1,920 people who provided assistance to 125 farms.
North Gyeongsang government last week said they started accepting applicants for agricultural startup support centers at four different universities in the province to encourage young generations to venture into the field. For those aged 18 to 39, the program offers various programs for free from consulting to marketing, financing, mentoring, opening up businesses and networking. The service last year selected 503 applicants and helped them launch 160 new startups in the agricultural sector.
Kim Joo-ryung, Head of Division of Agriculture and Stockbreeding Distribution Bureau under the provincial government, said he hoped many young adults who are preparing startup businesses in rural communities take advantage of the support centers.
“Our province has been approved by the central government to hire the highest number of seasonal workers from overseas this year,” said Seok Sung-kyun, the chief of Eco-Friendly Agriculture Bureau under Gangwon Province's government noting that the mountainous eastern province has allotted 6,425 migrant laborers. “The record number of foreign workers this year will help us overcome the worker shortage problem as they will be placed in the busiest farms in our region,” the chief added.