Socioeconomic Characteristics of Agro-touristic Farm Households and Its Implications in Rural Korea

The purpose of this study is to explore the socio-economic characteristics and their policy implications of agro-touristic farm households in rural Korea. The data were collected by questionnaire and obtained from 104 agro-touristic farmers and 104 village people in twenty two rural villages from April 20, 2002 to November 21, 2002 and analyzed. With the research results, it has been shown that, even Korean government's efforts to diversify farm management somewhat contributed to improve small farms' income, it was difficult for farm householders to grow their businesses continuously due to the following restrictions; 1) the age of farm managers were old to expand their new businesses, 2) the pluriactivities of agro-touristic farm households were not enough to supplement their income, and 3) they were not so much willing to take the risk from expanding the scale of agro-touristic business. As such, we suggested that the governments' policy makers consider to establish the policy goal of the rural tourism projects reasonably