South Korean Cultural Ecology - 1905 to 1990
Part 4 - Pollution and the Future -- Page 28

C. Pesticides and Fertilizer Usage

The increasing use of pesticides and fertilizers with the new variety of rice to increase rice production also has had serious repercussions. Pesticide use jumped from 1,577 metric tons to 42,300 metric tons between 1967 and 1985, catapulting Korea to the world's highest user of pesticides on a per acre basis. In 1978 pesticides were applied on average 8.5 times per year and that leaped to 20 times per year in 1984. The heavy use of petroleum-based fertilizers has been promoted by the government and also by the tenant farmers who because they are renting want to get production now while they have the land and have no great concern for the long run. This leads not only to pollution but also to the eventual exhaustion and desolation of the farmland. The Korean farmer applies six times as much fertilizer as does his American counterpart and thirteen times more than does the world level. Excessive use of urea leads to loss of soil fertility due to deficiencies of sulfur and is associated with zinc a loss that puts farmland out of useful production. Chemical fertilizers runoffs contribute to the contamination of groundwater, rice fields, and the rice crops with heavy metals such as cadmium and mercury.

The upper legal limit of cadmium in the US is 0.5 ppm and in Japan it is 1.0 ppm. Some vegetables in Korea have been tested as high as 7.6 ppm of cadmium. All six members of a farm family in Korea were poisoned by rice that contained extremely high levels of mercury. Some Korean farmers, because they do not trust their methods of growing food, raise vegetables organically for their own use and sell the chemically grown produce. There is a distinct lack of government monitoring of the dangerous levels of contamination in food.