Farming Is Korean's Life and He Ends It
in Despair
By JAMES BROOKE
ANGSU, South Korea, Sept. 15 ? Before Lee Kyung Hae left for Mexico
on his final mission to defend South Korean farmers, he climbed a hill
behind his old apple orchard here. In the quiet solitude of his former farm, he
cleaned up around his wife's tomb.
"He cut all the grass before departing," Lee Kyang Ja, his older sister, said
with surprise today, coming upon the site after climbing a dirt road behind
the farm. On Wednesday in Cancun, Mexico, Mr. Lee, a 55-year-old farm
union leader, scaled a barricade outside a meeting of the World Trade
Organization and then fatally plunged his old Swiss Army knife into his
heart.
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The big news out of Cancun this week was the breakdown in the World
Trade Organization talks, as the developing nations walked out in frustration
over farm subsidies. To most of the world, Mr. Lee's act may have seemed
like a sideshow, the latest face of extreme antiglobalist protest, perhaps, just
a final desperate measure by a disturbed man.
But in rural communities like this one in southern South Korea, Mr. Lee, a
three-time member of the provincial assembly, was seen as a heroic figure, a
defender of debt-ridden farmers struggling to maintain an age-old agrarian
tradition in a fast-developing country where manufacturing is king.
"Mr. Lee committed suicide to save the farmers," said An Sung Hyun, 65, a
neighbor. "He sacrificed himself for farmers like me."
That sentiment is echoed in a new banner that greets drivers as they enter
Jangsu. "The late Lee Kyung Hae, patriot and hero, we will follow your
goal," it reads. "We strongly oppose W.T.O. globalization."
To protect farmers, South Korea has tariffs of over 100 percent on 142 farm
products ? consumers here pay about four times American prices for rice ?
helping support six million farmers in a nation of 47 million people.
But South Korea's real money is made selling cars, ships and cellphones
around the world. To keep markets open for its economy, the world's 12th
largest, South Korea has recently made concessions on food imports, in
bilateral talks and in preliminary negotiations in the W.T.O. With each
concession, life gets a little harder for the farmers.
"It is not hard to guess why he chose to terminate his life," said La Jung Han,
an official in Seoul at the the Korean Advanced Farmers Federation, a group
Mr. Lee headed for many years. "Probably, the main motivation was
despair." It was "a despair deeply imbedded in the conditions of the farmers,
the agriculture industry and the rural communities."
From his wife's grave, Mr. Lee's view would have included his modest
one-story brick house and his experimental 40-acre farm. In the 1970's it was
an effort by a college graduate from Seoul, much commented upon, to
demonstrate how farmers could survive and compete despite declining
prices for their products.
As documented by national television at the time, he taught students from
agricultural colleges ways to extract greater yields from their crops, herds
and orchards, all in an effort to breathe economic life into South Korea's
countryside. Four years ago, he lost the farm in a foreclosure sale.
Beyond Mr. Lee's sloping farmland, the view extends to fertile, green
bottom lands, where rice paddies intermingle with weed lots.
"Even now the land is being abandoned," An Sung Hyun, said, pointing out
paddies abandoned across the valley floor. "If we import more food, more
land will be abandoned."
At the local community hall today ? as in dozens of rural communities
throughout South Korea ? a memorial altar, which bore Mr. Lee's portrait,
was framed by seven-foot-high arrangements of white carnations, lightly
illuminated by two mourning candles. All day long, groups of rough-cut men
with sunburned faces arrived, removed their shoes, deposited carnations and
bowed before his portrait.
"He was very strong and tender even though his image is one of violence,"
said Lee Young Jin, a printer and childhood friend. "He kept his faith and
loyalty to the farmers."
Despite his loyalties to his rural roots, Mr. Lee, the printer, said that he was
forbidding his own two children, both college students, to go into farming.
"Parents who are farming, don't want their children to do farming," he said,
speaking in a room filled with farmers. "There is no hope. They cannot get
any benefits from farming."
A city guide to Geneva, home to the World Trade Organization, was on the
bookshelf today of the spare room where Mr. Lee lived in a family house
here. In the room where his clothes still hung on hangers, a daughter, Lee
Goh Wun, pulled out scrapbooks containing newspaper clippings chronicling
his 30 years of farm protests, first in Seoul, then in cities around the world.
A decade ago, Mr. Lee stabbed himself in the stomach in Geneva. Last
February, he returned there, living in a tent outside the trade organization's
building and conducting a one-month hunger strike.
"He staged hunger strikes 30 times," said Lee Kyang Ja, his older sister, who
followed his protests even though she lived in Chile for most of the 1990's.
"For him, the most important things were farmers, his parents and his three
daughters."
His daughter Goh Wun was to be married on Sept. 28. But today she was
dressed in black. The wedding has been postponed.
"Frankly speaking, I am really, really proud of him," she said. "Because he
sacrificed himself not for himself, but for the nation."