Chungnam Deploys Laotian 'Seasonal Workers' During Farming Season in Rural Areas

Chungnam Province will receive labor support from Laos to alleviate the chronic labor shortage faced by local farms during the farming season.

On the 24th, the province announced that nine seasonal workers from Laos arrived in Korea for the first time under the memorandum of understanding for seasonal worker recruitment signed with Laos at the end of last year.

Seven of the seasonal workers were assigned to Boryeong and two to Nonsan, where they will stay on farms for five months from spring to summer to assist with tasks such as sowing and harvesting.

Before being assigned to farms, the nine seasonal workers received training through Laotian language communication assistants on immigration-related laws, life in Korea, basic legal knowledge, prevention of sexual harassment and sexual violence, and basic safety knowledge for agricultural work.

The province plans to recruit more than 300 seasonal workers from Laos out of the 2,403 foreign seasonal workers allocated by the Ministry of Justice in the first half of this year. In May, 23 additional Laotian seasonal workers are expected to arrive and be assigned to farms in the Chungnam region.

The province and city/counties will invest 1.1 billion KRW this year to improve the working environment for foreign seasonal workers and reduce the burden on employing farms by supporting living conditions as well as human rights and safety guarantees.

They are also exploring ways to expand public seasonal worker centers that comprehensively manage labor by providing shared accommodation and meals for seasonal workers.

Meanwhile, the current major crop cultivation area in Chungnam is 192,244 hectares, with an estimated annual labor demand of 15.64 million person-days.

Of this, hired labor accounts for 27.3%, making the recruitment of regular foreign workers essential.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.