Agricultural Market Liberalization, its Environmental Impact and Policy Implications

Objectives of this research are to analyze an environmental impact of agricultural market liberalization and to find environmental policy implications.
Agricultural market liberalization has been widely known since UR and WTO and it has negative impact on our agricultural market which has low international competitiveness power. Especially, rice product among other agricultural products are negatively affected after liberalization. The reduction of rice production will cause decrease of rice paddy field area.
Impact of reduction of agricultural production on environment is two-fold; positive effect is decrease of pollutants and negative impact is reduction of green fields and loss of natural environment due to change of farm land utilization structure through rice paddy field reduction.
After the discussion of agricultural market liberalization was started, rice paddy field area decreased 12.3% during past 10 years and that of Seoul, Daejeon, Gyeonggi, Gyeongnam province had decreased 26~35% representing the most decrease in rice paddy field area.
Thus the impact of agricultural trade liberalization on fertilizer consumption, generation of livestock wastewater, and waste generation and urbanization trend are analyzed.
1) Fertilizer Consumption
The analysis on the relationship between fertilizer consumption and liberalization, rice paddy field area, dry field area shows that;
Variables of rice paddy field area, dry field area and liberalizatio