The Agroecology Fund recently collaborated with A Growing Culture on five episodes of their Hunger For Justice Series. Launched to highlight the inequities of the industrial food system exposed by Covid-19, these live broadcasts featured agroecology leaders from the AEF grantee network, and sought to amplify their grassroots community-led solutions for resilience.
“The series is a chance to pull people with an environmental focus into the social aspect of the food movement. A lot of the people tuning in are familiar with regenerative agriculture and sustainability but not food sovereignty and agroecology,” says A Growing Culture’s Loren Cardeli.
On July 31, the series featured AEF grantee partner, the Korean Women Peasants’ Association (KWPA). The president of the National Federation of Women’s Farmers’ Association, Kim Ok Im and Kim Jeong Yeol, member of The International Coordination Committee (ICC) of La Via Campesina, shared their experiences fighting against injustice and gender inequity in South Korea.
“In Korean folklore, the mung bean, or nokdu, is symbolic of the resilient spirit of the Korean peasants. In the harshest conditions, nokdu sprouts and grows, feeding the hungry. In the face of domestic and international policies that have systematically undermined their livelihoods and depressed the countryside, Korean peasants and farmers are sprouting, growing, and inspiring Koreans and global citizens alike.”
In 2013, The Nation reported on the food sovereignty movement in South Korea. Its resilience is perhaps most clearly demonstrated by the Korean Women Peasants’ Association (KWPA), founded in 1989 “to empower and unite women farmers and resist neoliberal agricultural policies in South Korea.” “Free trade agreements allowed for cheap food that is not nutritious to enter the diets of the Koreans. Because of these imported foods, local food prices dropped,” said KWPA’s Kim Ok Im. In the ’90s, South Korean farmers carried out mass protests against imports of staples, particularly rice, both the symbol of Korean society and center of the country’s farming for thousands of years.
As in other developing countries, small-scale peasants in South Korea could not compete with the subsidized commodities flooding their market. Many attempted to find additional work off-farm, many were driven to debt, bankruptcy and suicide; others had to abandon agriculture entirely. (The percentage of farmers in the population has dropped from 50% in the 1970s to less than 7% in the 2010s.)
Women peasants, who comprise more than half the farmworkers in rural South Korea, bore the brunt of these impacts. As South Korea’s industrialized food system damaged rural economies, it also contributed to eroding the traditional knowledge of the peasants, but particularly, rural women’s knowledge and by extension, their place in society.
The KWPA, built while “carrying their children on their back”, empowered women peasants in South Korea to be more autonomous and advocate for food sovereignty, agroecology, and gender justice in a patriarchal society.
“Peasant women play a big role in farming, but were set aside for decades. The movement helped women to be more active in decision making,” said Kim Jeong Yeol.
“Without agroecology, we cannot have food sovereignty.”
KWPA practices, promotes, and advocates for agroecological practices, rejecting the use of chemical inputs on their land. In an effort to preserve the cultural heritage of Korean native seeds, KWPA runs more than 20 indigenous seed production farms. Women, traditionally the stewards of seed biodiversity, share this work collectively. “Even if there is nothing to eat, we will have our seeds,” they said.
Worldwide, farmer-managed seeds are fast disappearing; the women of KWPA are doing the important work of documenting and archiving the diversity they protect.
Through their My Sister’s Garden initiative, KWPA supplies urban consumers with seasonal baskets of produce they have grown from indigenous seeds on their plots. For more than a decade, groups of women peasants have packaged and distributed these farm boxes to “show the face of the farmers who are producing healthy foods”; forging a closer connection between peasants and consumers. This Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) model has empowered peasant women in South Korea, providing income and dignity despite the lack of equal rights and opportunities. “Even if women are small farmers, collectively we can make an impact,” shared Kim Jeong Yeol.
At the national level, KWPA advocates for access to land and credit and support for agroecology. The peasant movement actively participates in peace building efforts, and was part of the first reunification conference between North and South Korean farmers.
“We should remind ourselves we are the masters of our own production, and we have the power to change the world,” said Kim Ok Im.
As a member of the international network La Via Campesina, the women share their knowledge with other social movements around the world, and also collectively resist international policies that affect farmers’ rights.
Watch the full recording on YouTube:
Photographs courtesy KWPA.