“Unification Rice” Fed the Poor

I By Michael Breen

As the phrase that sums up Korean development suggests, “the Miracle on the Han River” is the story of a government-led exodus from the village to the city.

However, it is a measure of just how poor and unprepared the people were for industrial growth, that as the authorities started nationbuilding, They also had to intervene in a big way simply to ensure everyone had enough to eat. This overlooked chapter in Korea's story explains why there was so much resistance to what now seem like common-sense ideas about building roads and entering new industries. How can we focus on long-term national development, people ― including bureaucrats ― wondered, when we don't know where the next meal is coming from.

This was a question that the president of the day, Park Chunghee, the army general who conceived and drove the economic miracle, knew very well. As a poor boy, he was familiar with the perennial food shortages. The toughest time of year came in late spring when last year's rice was all gone and the new barley crop was still ripening.

South Korea's road to self-sufficiency in rice was not an easy one and involved more than the development of high-yield varieties and development of the broader economy to the point that the country could comfortably import food. It would most likely have been impossible without the strong support of Park and without his dictatorial powers to enforce his preferences. Even so, it was not easy, as the resistance of farmers to “Tongil” rice itself illustrates.

Park employed the kind of discipline that he and his generation absorbed during their Japanese-style education in the pre-war colonial period. The types of initiative he enforced are now long-forgotten. We associate them today with North Korea, which remains a dictatorship and hopelessly incapable of feeding its own. They included the designation of “no-rice days” when rice was not to be sold anywhere. In theory people were not supposed to eat rice at home on such days but, given their resistance in other others, such patriotism was probably not apparent behind closed doors.

Another measure came in 1963, two years after Park's military coup but before industrial development really started, when merchants were ordered to mix rice with 20 percent of other grains. Restaurants were supposed to do the same when serving rice to customers.

Women were mobilized in public events to encourage and educate housewives in making flour-based meals. White rice, the basis for breakfast, lunch and dinner meals in Korean households, was labeled luxurious. Women could do their part for the revolution ― although that was not the word used ― by learning how to make bread and noodles. A body called the National Reconstruction Movement operated consultation centers teaching flour-based cooking.

Media did their bit too, with articles claiming that western people were more intelligent than Asian, and therefore more successful, because they ate bread.

In principle this campaign was all in the spirit of encouragement, but in practice it could be heavy-handed. Admittedly less dramatic than the forced haircuts of long-haired men and mini-skirt measuring on the streets by police, parents faced far more intrusive checks of their children's lunch-boxes at school.

While older Koreans today remember times of hardship, the specifics are often forgotten. This is in part because they were not interpreted as infringements upon personal liberties. Such concepts had no history in old Korea and were therefore rather thinly understood. In fact, the campaigns captured the moral high ground for they required sacrifice by the individual for the national good. They are also forgotten because they were later justified by the results.

And that was because, unlike in North Korea, Park and his people looked for economic and practical solutions to permanently solve the problems of poverty and food shortage. Government experts at the Rural Development Administration looked at developing high yield varieties of rice. In 1964, they imported new seeds from Egypt. One test area, near the city of Suwon, resulted in 30 percent more rice than normal. This strain was distributed in 1967 but failed.

Then in 1968, researchers received a variety known as IR8 from the International Rice Research Institute. This body, base in the Philippines and funded with grants from the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations in America, was a key player in what became known as the Green Revolution, the effort to increased industrialized agriculture production in the developing world. IR8 was considered “miracle rice.” It doubled the yield, and provide more resistant to diseases and pests, and more responsive to fertilizer. But it was not suitable for Korean weather. “IR8 was basically developed for warm and humid weather such as weather in Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand and so on,” said Kim Yun-shik, an expert at Gyeongsang National University. “So, the government had to try to develop a new variety.”

There are two basic types of rice, Japonica which is sticky and small and medium length and Indica, which has long grains and is not sticky. IR8 was an Indica variety, and therefore not suited to Korean tastes, which was another reason that researchers set about coming up with a new variety. They crossed IR8 with a Japonica variety and came up with IR667, which became known as “Tongil (Unification)” rice. To speed up the development-to-production time, the RDA sent seed to the IRRI in the Philippines to grow there during the Korean winter. Some 10 kg of seed sent in 1970 had yielded 4.3 tons by the following spring.

[Picture]

Former President Park Chung-hee laughs

holding “Tongil (Unification)” rice. By 1976,

some three quarters of rice-producing land

were growing Tongil rice and the country,

as Park had hoped, became self-sufficient in rice.

President Park enthusiastically backed Tongil rice, attending rice plantings and referring to it in his New Year speeches from 1970 to 1974. “By 1976, I think self-sufficiency in rice will be possible if the variety (Tongil) is adopted by all rice growers, combined with development of new water sources, sufficient supply of chemicals and fertilizers, mechanization and paddy land readjustment,” Park said in his 1970 New Year press conference. (Self-sufficiency in rice was crucial so that foreign currency could be directed towards strategic industries.)

In February 1971, he participated in a tasting event where senior officials were asked by the RDA head to rate Tongil rice in terms of color, stickiness and taste. He added that they should keep their assessments anonymous. Most ticked the “moderate” box. Park, however, wrote “good” for color and taste and “moderate” for stickiness and then pointedly wrote his name on the sheet, to show his support. It was not all smooth planting, however. The crop in 1972 was poor due to heavy rains, flooding, cold weather and high winds. The government paid the equivalent of $376,000 in compensation after farmers complained that the new rice was at fault. Local government officials in turn opposed the new rice and, at the end of the year, the Ministry of Agriculture announced that anyone recommending a specific strain of rice to farmers would be punished, insisting that the choice was up to farmers.

[Picture]

A “samulnori,” or Korean traditional percussion performance, is depicted on rice fields in

Goesan County, North Chungcheong Province, on Sept. 30, 2009. “Tongil” rice played a

major role in solving hunger problems in the 1970s, but disappeared due to an outbreak

of blast disease that affected almost 20 percent of paddies in 1978.

This ruling was changed after Park himself intervened. He wanted to increase production and decrease consumption. Awards were announced for farmers with the highest yields. Despite this, in 1973, the area with Tongil rice dropped by around one third. Yields, however, were around 37 percent higher than for conventional rice. This phenomenal result partly removed farmers' doubts.

Another factor was price. Even though Tongil rice was lowerquality than conventional rice, the government paid the same amount for it. From 1970, the government every year raised the amount it paid in its rice purchase program so that by 1974, when market prices fell below government purchase prices, farmers were clamoring for Tongil rice.

A third factor in the rapid adoption of Tongil rice was that local officials had targets for the numbers of farmers in their jurisdiction they were required to persuade, and were penalized if they didn't meet them. With their promotions at stake, some officials employed a confrontational strategy with producers who stuck to their preference for conventional, better quality rice. Shouting matches in paddy fields became common place. In some case, government workers confiscated non-Tongil seed and even pulled up some rice that had been planted.

In keeping with the country's tradition of political mass mobilization, bureaucrats, solders and students joined in the rice-planting effort to underscore the national significance of the endeavor. In 1975, four million participated. In 1979, five million. The net result was that by 1976, some three-quarters of rice-producing land was Tongil rice and the country, as Park had hoped, became self-sufficient in rice. The spring hunger went into the history books. Ironically, however, it would not be long before Tongil rice itself became history.

As Koreans did not really like its taste, researchers continued to experiment, not only to increase productivity but also to improve the quality of conventional rice varieties. Then two unexpected events combined to accelerate the demise of Korea's own miracle rice. In 1978, an outbreak of blast disease affected almost 20 percent of paddies and Tongil rice proved least resistant. Then in late 1979, Park, Tongil rice's cheerleader, was assassinated. The government adjusted its high purchase price and started recommending more non-Tongil varieties of rice.

 “In the late 1980s, the yield of medium and short grains caught up with the yield of Tongil rice,” said Kim Yun-shik. There was no need to keep producing what consumers felt was low quality rice. “Furthermore, consumption of rice per person had decreased over time, so the government did not need to stick to the high-yield variety.” Now with the medium- and short-grain rice of much better quality than rice produced in the 1970s on their tables, Tongil rice is just a memory.