Let’s Remove the Shackles of the 80-Year-Old “Land to the Tiller” Principle

Korean agriculture would grind to a halt without foreign workers / Rural communities, the last line of defense for food security, are collapsing / It is time to focus on “use” rather than “ownership” / We must find a breakthrough through the “corporatization of agriculture”

Last year, for the first time in history, the number of people in farming households in Korea fell below 2 million. According to the Korea Rural Economic Institute, the farming household population in 2025 was tallied at 1.982 million, and is projected to decline further to 1.945 million this year.

This is a warning siren that the population and labor base of rural communities is collapsing. In this situation, we need to reexamine the principle of tiller’s right to the land, the constitutional foundation of Korean agriculture.

Article 121 of the Constitution states: “The State shall endeavor to achieve the principle of tiller’s right to the land with respect to farmland, and tenancy on farmland shall be prohibited.”

This principle was introduced in the period immediately following liberation, when the overwhelming majority of the population were tenant farmers, in order to distribute farmland to those who actually cultivated it, ease excessive concentration of property rights, and establish owner-operated farms as the basic unit of the market economy. In that historical context, the principle was clearly a rational choice and also played a positive role in helping Korea establish a market system.

But 80 years later, this principle is out of touch with reality. Nearly half of all farmland is already cultivated through leases, and patchwork exceptions permitting non-owner cultivation—such as inheritance, departure from farming, weekend experiential farming, and agricultural corporations—have piled up. The tenancy the Constitution prohibited has not disappeared; it has merely changed its name to leasing. The Farmland Act has become not a law that distinguishes violators, but one that justifies exceptions.

The more fundamental problem is that the principle of tiller’s right to the land is acting as a shackle blocking the future of Korean agriculture. By asserting that only those who farm may own farmland, it effectively bars large-scale capital from entering the farmland sector.

As a result, Korean agriculture has been unable to move beyond a dispersed structure centered on small owner-operated farms. Farms with less than 1 hectare of cultivated land account for about 70% of all farm households, and the average cultivated area per household stands at only 1.55 hectares as of 2025. In other words, Korean agriculture is moving in the exact opposite direction of economies of scale.

The decline in cultivated land is also accelerating. According to the Korea Rural Economic Institute, cultivated land in 2025 totaled 1,499,510 hectares, meaning the government’s 1.5 million-hectare threshold—set as the last line of defense for food security—has already been breached. The labor shortage is even more severe. The number of workers employed in agriculture, forestry, and fisheries fell 6.0% year-on-year to 1.395 million in 2025, and the gap is being filled by foreign seasonal workers.

In the first half of 2026, 93,503 foreign seasonal workers were assigned, setting a new all-time high, and in effect making it impossible to farm without foreign labor. The premise of tiller’s right to the land—that the person who owns the land directly cultivates it—has already collapsed.

The solution lies in fundamentally improving agricultural productivity, and the path forward is the corporatization of agriculture. To raise productivity per unit of land through economies of scale and attract R&D investment in advanced agricultural technologies such as smart farms, precision agriculture, and plant factories, the long-term entry of stable capital is essential.

But under the current restrictions on farmland ownership, the path for ordinary companies to directly hold farmland and undertake large-scale operations is extremely narrow. There are systems such as agricultural cooperative corporations and agricultural company corporations, but capital raising is constrained by limits such as required farmer equity participation ratios. Capital cannot enter, farmland lies idle, and rural communities continue to empty out.

The rest of the world is already moving in a different direction. Despite its small territory, the Netherlands has become the world’s second-largest agricultural exporter after the United States through corporate management of greenhouse horticulture and the floriculture industry. The United States, Australia, and New Zealand have combined the tradition of family farming with corporate farming models and established themselves as key players in the global food supply chain. What these countries share is that they have rationally allowed capital to enter farmland ownership and management.

Of course, we must guard against the reckless conversion of farmland to non-agricultural uses and the encroachment of speculative capital on rural communities. But the solution lies not in the anachronistic constitutional principle of tiller’s right to the land, but in land-use regulation and ex post oversight that guarantee farmland’s agricultural use. The principle in Article 121 of the Constitution should be abolished or substantially revised, and the Farmland Act should be redesigned to focus not on “who owns it,” but on “how it is used.”

The fact that the farming household population has fallen below 2 million is not just a statistic; it is a signal that the existing paradigm of Korean agriculture has reached its limits. The spirit of land reform 80 years ago was not the protection of owner-operated farms for its own sake, but the provision of stable food supplies and prosperity to the people through an efficient agricultural structure suited to the times. The spirit of our age is to bring capital and technology into agriculture, raise productivity, and make rural communities places of opportunity once again. It is now time to cast off the shackles of tiller’s right to the land.

Philip Chung

Researcher, Center for Free Enterprise (CFE)

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Original title: 80년 묵은 '경자유전'의 족쇄를 풀자

Author: Philip Chung

Date: 2026-05-07

Source: https://www.cfe.org/bbs/bbsDetail.php?cid=press&pn=1&idx=28885