ENHANCING LINKAGE BETWEEN MILITARY AND AGRO-FOOD INDUSTRY SECTORS IN KOREA

Abstract

The Ministry of National Defense (MND) is the biggest governmental consumer in the Korean agro-food sector. In 2006, the quantity of purchased agricultural products was about 260 thousand tons and the MND spent about 300 billion won for this purchase. The purpose of this paper is to review the current status of the food purchase system of MND and to suggest renewed roles of MND and the agro-food sector for better alliance. After evaluating the current food purchase system of MND, two main roles of MND were suggested: offering opportunities for Korean agro-food suppliers to sell their high-quality products and developing a purchase system to promote competition among suppliers. As the roles of the agro-food sector, stable supplying of cheap agro-food and making differentiation of domestic agro-food are suggested. There are only few studies due to the difficulty of accessing information, or numerical data, about the agro-food purchase system of MND, but discussing the purchase system of MND to boost the competitiveness of Korean agriculture is very important. This paper is supposed to offer a starting point for this discussion.