친환경 농업기술의 발전방향

Prospective of Sustainable Agriculture in Korea

Over the last three decades, Korean farming system has been directed to maximum agricultural production and to increase farmer's income through adoption of high-yielding crop varieties and high input of agrochemicals . These farming practices have resulted in problems of water-quality deterioration, soil degradation , and food safety. At present, over 40 million tones of animal waste are bing produced annually, which amounts to disposing the waste at the annual rate of 20 tones per ha in the total area of farming land in Korea. Nearly a half of total available water resources is used as irrigation water predominantly for rice paddy field. Thus, non-point source contamination of the water resources has been linked to agriculture across the nation. However, the extent to which agriculture contributes to the water quality is not fully known. Recently, Korean government provided various institutional measures to reduce the negative impacts of agricultural practices on the environ ental quality, and the Agricultural Environment Act was also passed by the legislature in 1998 and became effective January 1999. This Act does not cover the broad spectrum of the sustainable agriculture ; thus, the limited incentives within this Act are arguably ineffective to control the non-point source pollution. Recently new bulk blending of fertilizers(BB fertilizer) are bing produced (100, 000 tones in 1998) with Government subsidies. The BB fertilizers are to balance N-P-K ratio in the soils . Although the use of the BB fertilizers are encouraged with Government subsidies, non-point source pollution is still serious and will become worse. Precision farming is regarded as a new means for sustainable agriculture. It is a new technology that modifies the existing techniques and incorporates new one such as GIS, GPS , differential applicator to produce a new set of tools for the farmer to use. Precision farming, however, has constraints for individual farming practices. For exam le , farm size or parcel unit of each farmer is too small to adopt the precision agriculture on farmhouse-hold bases and farmer's ability to adopt the new technology is limited. However, it would be appropriate to establish local or regional cooperatives to operate such a precision farming system. It is recommended that Government provide sufficient incentives to help establish local and/or regional cooperatives.