Due to the rise in demand for labor in the industrial sector during the period of economic growth that began in the 1960s, people moved from rural villages to urban areas, substantially reducing the agricultural population. In the 1990s, the market for agricultural products was increasingly opened to the rest of the world, and imports of low-priced agricultural products increased. Partly because of this, the rural economy shrank as rural communities lost their vitality. Even today, agricultural land in South Korea is continuing to decline mainly for such reasons as the conversion of agricultural land due to urbanization and industrialization and an increase in the area of cultivated land that is abandoned due to the ageing of the population caused by the drift of young people and those in their prime of life to the cities. The area of agricultural land declined from 2,298,000 ha in 1970 to 1,715,000 ha in 2010 (You and Iizawa, 2005; Statistics Korea, 2011). The “Sae-maeul” movement, which meant “creating new villages” in the spirit of self-help and cooperation, started on a nationwide scale in the 1970s. This was a movement to modernize farming villages and aimed to improve their economic, social, and cultural status using a maeul as the unit of the movement, thus raising the level of welfare of all rural areas in the country. In addition, a wide range of projects such as improving the living environment, developing the production infrastructure, and increasing agricultural incomes were carried out, and as a result, the income of farmers grew and their living standards improved. In these rural development projects, however, the characteristics of individual agricultural villages and their traditional customs were not taken into consideration as a result of the uniform government-led form of development, and many of the ecological functions of agricultural villages that maintained the natural environment as well as their function of handing down traditional culture to posterity were lost (Cho and Yamaji, 2005). As described above, traditional rural landscapes in South Korea are being lost due to industrialization, urbanization, government-led development, and other factors.

Since 2000, various related ministries have implemented rural area revitalization projects with villages as their units. The “Rural Traditional Theme Maeul” project, which was launched by the Rural Development Administration in 2002, aims to identify outstanding natural landscapes and traditional cultures unique to agricultural villages as well as the knowledge required to maintain these, and then to enliven the lives of farmers and promote urban-rural exchanges through experience, learning, stays with farmers, direct sales of agricultural products, and other initiatives with traditional rural culture as their theme. By 2009, 440 villages nationwide had been registered with the Rural Development Administration. This project is carried out through village meetings based on consultations and agreements made by the residents with the administrative support of provinces and municipalities and with the cooperation of experts (Kim and Ohashi, 2005; Kim and Mitsuhashi, 2009). In 2005, the Ministry of the Environment launched “Ecologically Excellent Village and Ecologically Well-Restored Village” project. This project certifies Ecologically Excellent Villages or Excellent Well- Restored Villages, and certified villages receive a budget from the project’s fund for three years. This system aims to educate local residents in the importance of protection of the natural environment and resource management and revitalize regional economies as agricultural tourism villages (JWRC, 2009). There are still issues to be addressed, however, as shown by the example of Gacheon Darangyi Village, which is located at the southernmost tip of South Kyŏngsang Province’s Namhae County. The landscape consisting of mountains, terraced rice fields, private houses, terraced rice fields, and the sea arranged in this order was recognized as a rural landscape and traditional cultural resource. Since the landscape was designated as a “Rural Traditional Theme Maeul” site in 2002, the number of tourists visiting the village has increased, and the villagers as tourist home operators have economically benefited from the tourism boom, but the truth is that this has not yet contributed to a rise in income for the farmers (Kim and Mitsuhashi, 2009).