米穀生産의 效率性 增大를 위한 農業調整

Farm Adjustments for the Efficiency Increase of Rice Production

Since (1) rice was a main food of Korean people, (2) world prices for grains were unstable, (3) and conservation of foreign currencies was necessary for the balance of payments, the Korean government set the achievement of self-sufficiency in rice as one primary goal. However no economic unit can continue to function effectively without due consideration given to economic well-being of individual farmers, economic well-being of rice farmers should be promoted for continuous and effective increase of rice production. Actual level of input use was lower than profit maximizing level for 1971-1977, whereas the actual the actual level was higher than the maximum profit level for the following two periods, 1965-1970 and 1978-1981. Therefore economic profit of rice farmers has been decreased in recent years. On the other hand, since input had negative effect in contrast to the positive effect of output for the farm income growth, input decrease and output increase were needed. As a result, to increase the profit maximiing level of input and farm income, resource efficiency should be increased. However, with the ratio increase of capital resource input to total input, the decreased capital resource efficiency caused the decline of total resousce efficiency. Therefore the increase of capital resource efficiency becomes a determinant factor for the increase of total efficiency. From the results of statistical analysis, efficiencies of three major capital resources increased as farm size increased and the differences of efficiencies among the various levels of farm size were statistically significant. Thus expansion of farm size is needed to increase the total efficiency through the increase of capital resource efficiencies. From the survey results of 100 farm households in Chung-Buk area, it is proposed that credit system for purchasing paddy land be considered to increase farm size in small scale farms less than 1.5ha with due consideration of interest rate and of the reduction of internal capital rationing through the VMP increase, and that working process be faciliated by mechanization in large scale farms more than 1. 5 ha. That is, MPP and product price should be increased by the technolgical advance and government price policy, and agicultural mechanization should be promoted in such ways to solve hard working process as well as labor shortage problem.