THE INFLUENCE OF DOMESTIC POLITICAL PRESSURE

ON INTERNATIONAL TRADE POLICY:

BEHAVIOR OF FARM LOBBY IN SOUTH KOREA

 

NAWAKURA, Akio

Assistant Professor, PhD, Meiji University, JAPAN, republic_of_korea_1948@hotmail.com

 

Abstract

This study asks why the farm lobby's resistance to trade liberalization with the Unite States resulted differently in Korea and Japan focusing on the role of public opinion, a political media to be influential on policymakers. Both in Korea and Japan, farm lobbies resisted to international agreements for trade liberalization with the United States because their agriculture is less competitive in international trade. However, despite it has politically advantageous resources in lobbying such as huge membership and prerogative political channels to ruling parties, the Japan's farm lobby of the JA group won only USD 5,000,000 for single year as the government's compensation of the Trans Pacific Partnership. Meanwhile, the Korea's farm lobby, which has had poor political resources in lobbying, won USD 20,000,000,000 for a decade as the compensation of the Korea-US Free Trade Agreement. This study hypothesizes that the impact of public opinion contributed to the two nations' gap in terms of financial achievement of the farm lobbies’ activities. In Korea, the farmers' lobbying gained broad social support through massive street rally and became influential on the government. On the other hand, the JA group in Japan gained poor public support in the argument on trade liberalization and the poor public support caused its limited influence on the government. The analysis above shows us implication that the public support plays major role in lobbying enough to cover poor political resources of lobbying groups. In addition, this study indicates how Korean farmers have gained rich public support in their political activities.

Keyword: trade liberalization, agriculture, lobbying, public opinion, Korea