Ministry of Agriculture Food Disaster Countermeasure Loan Support Execution Rate Stagnates at 0.6%

Execution Performance of 2018 Loan Support Project Remained at Barely 15%

[Image source=Yonhap News]

[Sejong=Asia Economy Reporter Kim Hyunjung] The Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs has shown consistently poor execution rates in the loan program that provides loans to farmers for damages to private property such as crops, funded from the disaster and emergency budget.

According to data on the "Execution performance of loan projects within the Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs' disaster countermeasure budget" identified by Kim Youngjin, a member of the National Assembly's Agriculture, Food, Rural Affairs, Oceans and Fisheries Committee from the Democratic Party of Korea, in 2019, out of the 6.187 billion KRW allocated to the Agricultural Policy Insurance Finance Corporation for disaster and emergency loan support projects, only 0.6% (38 million KRW) was actually executed.

Furthermore, the disaster countermeasure loan project carried out in 2018 also showed a poor execution rate of 15%, with only 545 million KRW executed out of the total budget of 3.656 billion KRW, failing to provide significant benefits to farmers facing difficulties due to disasters.

Assemblyman Kim Youngjin stated, "It is true that disaster and emergency budgets are based on the premise of irregular disaster occurrences, making annual expenditure difficult to predict. However, to improve the efficiency of national fiscal management, it is necessary to prepare the budget within the minimum required limits by sufficiently forecasting in advance and considering the damage and recovery trends caused by disasters, as well as the scale of carryover."

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