This Year’s Basic Public Service Direct Payment of '2.3 Trillion Won' to Be Distributed

The Scale of Small-Scale Farmer Direct Payments Increases to 671.3 Billion Won This Year

The Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs announced on the 29th that starting next month, approximately 2.3 trillion KRW in the 2024 Basic Public Direct Payment will be paid to about 1.28 million farms and farmers who have been verified for eligibility.

The scene of rice harvesting at a farm in Wontong-ri, Buk-myeon, Inje-gun, Gangwon Province last August [Image source=Yonhap News]

The Basic Public Direct Payment is divided into the Small-scale Farmer Direct Payment and the Area-based Direct Payment. The Small-scale Farmer Direct Payment is a system that provides 1.3 million KRW per farm to small-scale farmers with farmland area of 0.5 hectares or less to stabilize the income of small and medium-sized farmers. The Area-based Direct Payment is paid at a set unit price according to the farmland area, with the unit price ranging from 1 million to 2.05 million KRW per hectare.

This year, the number of recipients for the Small-scale Farmer Direct Payment is 520,000 households, with a total payment amount of 671.3 billion KRW. Notably, this year, the payment unit price per farm for the Small-scale Farmer Direct Payment increased from 1.2 million KRW last year to 1.3 million KRW this year. The total payment amount also increased by 83.8 billion KRW compared to last year (587.5 billion KRW). The number of recipients for the Area-based Direct Payment is 770,000 people, with a total payment of 1.6371 trillion KRW.

The Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs has been verifying eligibility requirements, checking compliance, and cracking down on fraudulent claims to ensure that the Public Direct Payment is properly paid to farmers who actually cultivate the land. To enable rapid payment to farmers, the distribution to each city and province is scheduled to be completed by the 30th. Afterwards, city, county, and district offices will verify applicants’ bank accounts and proceed to pay the Public Direct Payment sequentially to farmers by the end of the year.

Yun Won-seup, Director of Agricultural Policy at the Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs, said, "We will continue to improve the system by raising the payment unit price and updating eligibility requirements so that the Public Direct Payment can serve as a basic income safety net for farmers," adding, "We will also strengthen crackdowns on fraudulent claims that violate actual cultivation to ensure that the Public Direct Payment budget returns to farmers."

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