Examined in this study is the 3rd ‘Village Development Program’ of the General Restoration Plan initiated to respond to the Namhan-gang flooding in the river’s basin area (filled with agricultural and mine districts) by the Relief & Rehabilitation Committee in the early and middle 1970s.
Since the beginning of 1973, the Village Development program was promoted in 38 villages which had to leave severely flooded areas. After a survey of the villages’ respective aptitudes, villages were selected and their leaders were invited to a training course before the program began. They organized Village Development Councils where they discussed project plans, and the Committee requested the village councils to organize cooperatives which would receive the loans. The loans must be repaid without an interest, in four equal installments after a grace period of one year. The loans were calculated in the form of rice, at the ‘government-purchase’ price.
Guidance workers were employed to assist the Village Development program. The program included productive cooperative projects that would increase the income, and it was encouraged to create many cooperative organizations in marketing, loan business, insurance and utilization. Potential leaders of the villages were discovered and trained steadily so that they could carry out the projects of their villages independently, cooperatively, and democratically. The inhabitants chose their own projects, organized a body to carry out them, and worked out a reasonable project plan of operation. All these achievements were attained through free and democratic conferences of the participants. As a result, the level of self-reliance on the participants’ part got higher. They raised their own capacity of meeting, comprehended the principles of cooperation, and kept improving their cooperative ways in farming and management.
The village development program showed the possibility of a village development conducted in a democratic fashion and also with the collaborative experience of the farmers, and at the same time it indicated the potential strengths of the peasant movements. Such experience was a great asset for the upcoming efforts and struggles of the Korean Catholic Farmers’ Movement, and it also played a great role in pioneering the farmer educations in the Christian Academy’s peasant movements in the 1970s. At the time, the Village Development program was only conducted in 2 percent of all the towns located in three provinces and 11 cities, yet with those efforts the importance and necessity of rural development projects led by the private sector came to be duly recognized.