청년농업인의 농촌사회 정착의 어려움과 부모의 사회자본 영향에 관한 질적 연구

Abstract

Preceding studies on young farmers tend to address the high entry barriers for rural communities against newcomers. Those studies focus on horizontal social capital formed around rural local communities, which emphasizes that young new farmers need to build relationships with local members for their settlement. However, new evidence suggests a different solution; whether young farmers successfully adjust to rural areas depends more on vertical social capital inherited from parents than horizontal social capital. In this vein, this study conducted in-depth interviews with 16 young farmers. According to the analysis, discriminations and exclusions that young farmers experienced when settling in rural areas varied depending on the social capital formed by their parents. Parents’ social capital significantly influenced the young farmers entering rural areas. In this sense, young “inherited” farmers easily adjusted to already familiar local networks. In contrast, young new farmers faced many difficulties while settling in a new local network due to the territoriality of local members. Accordingly, because they lacked parents’ social capital, their relationship with local members was, at best, superficial; their involuntary lack of close connection with local members further impeded them, bereaving them of opportunities to obtain valuable agricultural information. Therefore, they experienced inequities in receiving local government funding due to lack of information and exclusion. This paper suggests that parents’ social capital heavily influences young farmers who dream of agricultural success, resulting in varying degrees of discrimination and exclusion. The parent’s social capital is a positive factor for inherited farmers, while the opposite is true for new farmers. It even had a severe impact on the determination of recipients of governmental support projects. In this sense, a reproduction of social capital is in action. In sum, parents’ social capital provides important implications for understanding the settlement process of young start-up farmers in rural areas by revealing that they are starting from different starting lines. Preceding studies on the effect of social capital in rural areas have attempted to revitalize horizontal social capital but said studies did not focus on vertical social capital inherited to young farmers. Therefore, this paper provides important implications for examining the reproduction of inequality experienced by young farmers. Since the survival of start-up farmers is not merely a problem posed to individual young farmers, policy support and social interest for start-up farmers are critical. With these supports, one could expect that young farmers, especially those experiencing high barriers, may settle and survive in rural areas stably.