The ruling party is pushing to revise the Farmland Act so that corporations funded or established by local governments, as well as consumer cooperatives, can buy farmland and lease it to actual cultivators. The rationale is that the Farmland Bank's budget alone cannot absorb the volume of land that aging farm households want to sell. The bank's farmland purchase budget for next year is 2.0305 trillion won. That money can buy 5,850 hectares, just 0.75% of the area covered by the in-depth farmland survey running through the end of this year. The move is meant to prepare for a possible increase in farmland subject to disposal orders after the full survey, but it is doubtful that simply widening the pool of buyers will ease farmers' anxiety.
As controversy over property rights infringement in the full farmland survey has grown, the government and the ruling party have belatedly begun offering remedies. Even after Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs Minister Song Mi-ryung stressed that land is not subject to forced disposal unless speculation is clear, farmers' unease has not subsided. That is why critics say the government has pushed the principle that land should belong to those who till it without examining the rural reality in which ownership and cultivation have long been separated. What farmers fear is not the survey itself but the disposal orders and enforcement fines that follow a finding of violation. Without clear standards for distinguishing speculative holdings from leases or fallow land arising from inheritance, departure from farming and aging, any remedy will amount to a patch.
According to the Ministry of Data and Statistics' 2025 Census of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries, 73.9% of farm households sell less than 10 million won worth of agricultural and livestock products a year. The average age of farm operators is 67.7. Cracking down on speculation cannot resolve the farmland problems rooted in aging and small-scale farming. President Lee Jae-myung also said on the 29th that farmland an elderly farmer has entrusted to a neighbor to cultivate is not a matter for enforcement. He added that "solar farming" using idle fields could become popular. If so, the full survey should not stop at catching illegal farmland but should serve as the basic data for grasping how farmland is actually used and for designing policy. The government must clarify the line between speculation and customary leasing, and overhaul rules on entrusted leasing. Along with public purchases, it should widen the path for a range of operators, including agricultural corporations, to lease and cultivate idle farmland. Policy should weigh who will keep using the land more heavily than who owns it.
