The ruling party is rushing to draft safeguards for the government's sweeping farmland audit because farmers' anxiety over forced disposal orders is turning into broader political discontent. With the Chuseok holiday approaching, concern is growing that the audit could become the spark that inflames sentiment among farmers. The opposition has stepped up its attacks, pointing to confusion in rural communities caused by the Lee Jae-myung administration's farmland policy.
Members of the Democratic Party on the National Assembly's Agriculture, Food, Rural Affairs, Oceans and Fisheries Committee and the Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs held a closed-door meeting on the 16th and will convene a party-government consultative meeting on the 21st to discuss measures to supplement the audit, political sources said on the 17th. The party's first focus is protecting tenant farmers. Under one option being reviewed, disposal orders against landowners who violated the Farmland Act through illegal leasing would be suspended for three years, while the cultivation rights of tenant farmers working those plots would be guaranteed. The aim is to prevent tenant farmers acting in good faith from losing their fields through a unilateral notice from the owner during the audit.
Behind the move is a judgment that the current system leaves gaps in protection for tenant farmers. Under the Farmland Act, owners who illegally hold farmland must till it themselves for three years to avoid forced disposal or enforcement fines. That leaves tenant farmers who had been renting the land losing their fields overnight. Critics say this could produce a paradox in which the audit, intended to restore the principle that land should belong to those who farm it, instead pushes working tenant farmers into crisis.
The party is also pursuing a plan to bring illegal leasing itself into the formal system. Under discussion is a temporary legalization measure that would require owners to voluntarily report farmland leases arranged off the books within a set period, and would waive or reduce enforcement fines for past illegal leasing if the arrangements are converted into legal forms such as entrusting the land to the Farmland Bank for leasing. The approach reflects a pragmatic view that crackdowns and penalties alone cannot correct leasing practices that have spread widely across rural areas.
The audit has touched off increasingly harsh exchanges between the rival parties. The People Power Party has repeatedly called for the audit, launched at President Lee Jae-myung's instruction, to be halted, saying it treats farmers as potential speculators.
"How futile and absurd is an investigation that began with the aim of catching people who treat farmland as an object of speculation," People Power Party leader Jang Dong-hyuk said at a supreme council meeting the same day. "It is fortunate that they are fixing it even now, but they should apologize to farmers first." Floor leader Chung Jom-sig added that "the root cause of this situation is the president's extreme view, which knows nothing of rural reality and sees every real estate issue through the frame of speculators."
The Democratic Party countered that the opposition was excessively stoking farmers' anxiety. "We issue a stern warning over the People Power Party's continued distortion of facts and forced sophistry," said Kwon Chil-seung, chair of the party's policy committee. Addressing the government, he said it "would be desirable to use the results of the farmland audit to punish clear acts of farmland speculation, as originally intended, and to handle minor violations arising from routine farmland use in rural communities through guidance and institutional improvement."
