Over the Mountains Are Mountains: Korean Peasant Households and Their Adaptations to Rapid Industrialization

Chapter 4. Subsistence, Productivity, and Household Adaptation

CHAPTER 4 Subsistence, Productivity, and Household Adaptation In the previous chapter, the cropping strategies of the villagers of Sangongni were characterized as "subsistence oriented." This subsistence orientation was not seen as the inevitable result of the application of traditional technology to the natural environment, as the result of the conservative outlook that some have seen as typical of smallholding peasants (Marx 1969:198-99; F. G. Friedman 1953; Foster 1973:84), or as the result of a particular peasant affinity for risk-adverse strategies (Scott 1976:5). Rather it was interpreted as a rational adaptive response to a number of environmental and sociological circumstances that were seen to condition village cropping strategies, including remoteness from urban markets, location at the end of marketing channels in a dendritic marketing system that imposes unfavorable terms of trade on the residents of outlying villages, and prices for crops during the sixties that led to low rates of capital accumulation and low rates of return on agricultural investment. Under these conditions , each farmer was seen as choosing his cropping patterns based on three criteria: (1) the amount of each crop his family expects to consume in the coming year; (2) the amount of male and female labor he has to use within his household; and (3) the amount of land of various types he has access to. Each of these criteria is linked to the others and ultimately is linked to the social organization of the household . Here we shall focus on the first of them: the consumption needs of the family. The subsistence requirements of the villagers in their mountain environment are historically derived. Estimates of cropping needs can be made by farmers on the basis of past experience and productivity. If a farmer thinks he needs a certain amount of various kinds of land to grow crops, he does so on the basis of assumptions about the number 91 92 Subsistence, Productivity, and Household Adaptation and variety of dishes normally consumed in rural Korea. These dishes reflect historical Korean culinary traditions that have a symbolic and sensual aspect as well as being nutritious. At prevailing levels of productivity a household of a given size and composition requires, at a minimum, a certain amount of land of each type to enable the production of those crops necessary to provide a traditional diet adequate for work and survival. This minimum amount of land1 is an adaptive requirement of the subsistence system that limits the decisions peasant farmers of Sangongni can make about cropping patterns and farm size, and thus indirectly influences the size and organization of the peasant household. Some adaptive requirements, such as necessary caloric intake, we can assume to have been relatively stable over the past generation.2 Dietary patterns, on the other hand, are partially dependent upon income and thus subject to change as income increases, even though the basic cultural assumptions underlying food behavior may have changed very little. Additional circumstances that affect adaptation, such as levels of productivity, have also changed dramatically over the last twenty-five years. As in other aspects of their life, then, the interaction between dietary preferences and cropping patterns of the peasants of Sangongni is conditioned by circumstances that have been subject to change over the last generation. The adaptive requirements of the 1980s are similar to those of the 1960s, but their socioeconomic ramifications are entirely different. Despite the many changes in the agricultural system over the past generation, the dependence of peasant households on their own resources for subsistence has been remarkably stable. As illustrated in table 4.1, even as the money income and cash expenditures of Korean peasant householders have increased, the percentage of their income used to purchase food has remained stable. Items such as meat, which, except for poultry, have always had to be purchased, have increased in their importance in the budget, but others, such as rice, have become less likely to be purchased. "Eating bought rice" has always been stigmatized in Sangongni as an indication of abject poverty. As they have developed more advanced and productive agricultural practices , the peasant agriculturalists of South Korea have devoted some of their enhanced productivity to growing this subsistence crop, which circumstances had sometimes kept them from growing before. The increased standard of living of Korean peasants does not, in this respect , seem to have induced them to abandon old goals so much as to Subsistence, Productivity, and...