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Who killed Lee Kyung Hae?
by Guy Babineau 

It’s the kind of landscape featured on postcards that fuel a 
Western romanticism of rural life in eastern Asia: tiered 
rice paddies, graceful woodlands, pagodas, and blue-green 
mountains rolling toward the horizon like cresting waves 
about to crash. The picturesque serenity of South Korea’s 
North Cholla province is misleading. Like the yin and yang 
symbol on the country’s flag, existence there is a circle 
locking together stark opposites in a perpetual cycle of 
codependency. The surface of calm belies despair. For 
centuries, hardship has been the real fact of life among the 
mainly small-scale, tenant farmers inhabiting the tough-to-
tame terrain of this part of an otherwise wealthy nation with 
the world’s 12th largest economy. A dozen years ago, 
roughly one out of seven people in the country were 
farmers. Today, their number has dwindled to less than one 
out of twelve.

In recent years, globalization’s stumbling but relentless 
march has broken through the country’s once sturdy barrier 
of protectionist trade policies. A mixture of EU, US, 
Japanese, and Canadian agricultural subsidies, tariff 
imbalances, factory farming, the importation of cheaper 
produce from China (which has deplorable labour and 
farming standards), and South Korea’s miraculous 
industrial expansion, have made things more difficult. Lee 
Kyung Hae spent his life trying to improve economic 
conditions for farmers in the region, becoming a local hero. 
Now, to some people, he’s a martyr.

Born in 1947 into a family of rice traders near the town of 
Jangsu a few hundred kilometres south of Seoul, Hae 
studied agricultural science at university. He returned home 
in the mid-1970s to claim 44 acres of mountainside he had 
inherited, with the ambitious goal of transforming it into 
bountiful farmland. It took five years to accomplish. He 
introduced a special breed of cattle to graze the property’s 
vertiginous incline, on levels between paddies of an 
especially hardy strain of rice that could withstand the 
elevation’s cold winter temperatures. With the help of 
German technologists, he constructed electric fences, 
previously unheard of in the area, and a cable car system 
for transporting livestock feed.

Renowned for its agricultural innovations, profitable Seoul 
Farm attracted farmers and students from across the 
country. Hae shared his successes with his wife, who died 
in a car accident in 1993, and three daughters. He was 
elected four times to North Cholla’s provincial legislature. 
In 1988, the United Nations gave him an award for rural 
leadership. Nonetheless, in the mid-1990s, people in the 
area began losing their farms for the reasons mentioned 
above. Several took their own lives, reflecting a higher-
then-average rate of suicide among farmers around the 
world. Hae’s farm was repossessed in 1999.

Last September 10, he climbed atop a security barrier at the 
WTO in Cancun. Wearing a sign that said, “The WTO Kills 
Farmers”, he stood above thousands of people who were 
there to protest agricultural trade inequities. He shouted a 
speech condemning indifference to the plight of farmers, 
then pulled out a penknife and thrust it into his chest. It 
pierced his left aorta, penetrating 4cm. He died in hospital a 
few hours later.

Most people would consider farming an honourable 
profession, and frequently heroic when faced with the 
whims of nature, and nowadays, man. On September 11, 
hundreds of mourners paraded through the World Trade 
Organization’s host city, carrying Hae’s coffin. The Mayor 
of Cancun proposed a memorial in his honour. At the same 
time, schoolchildren stood in front of the former site of 
Manhattan’s World Trade Center and read aloud the names 
of about three thousand people assassinated by suicidal 
desperadoes who were ostensibly deluded by their 
narcissistic leader’s bloodthirsty interpretation of Islam.

People don’t kill themselves harbouring doubts, even if 
their reasons are mysterious to the rest of us; or mystical. 
From the immolation of Buddhist monks during the French 
and American occupations of Vietnam, to the hunger 
strikes of the eminent Hindu Mahatma Gandhi during the 
British occupation of India and its aftermath, to the biblical 
self-sacrifice of Jesus Christ during the Roman occupation 
of you-know-where, throughout history religious 
conviction has prompted the powerless to use suicide as a 
potent, and sometimes poetic, form of protest against 
oppression, notably in agrarian-based cultures. By all 
accounts, Hae was not motivated by spiritual faith, but by 
something equally as fundamental; the preservation of a 
way of life found far beyond his country’s borders.

Traveling back in time, every single person on the planet, 
regardless of nationality, is tied to the land by ancestry. The 
late historian Arnold J. Toynbee, author of the ten-volume 
opus, A Study Of History, believed that history comprises 
the rise and fall of civilizations, not individual nations. 
From the perspective of Hae and his compatriots, the WTO, 
which reached an impasse when member countries broke 
off into factions that refused to cooperate with one another, 
was a forum pitting the civilization of agribusiness against 
the civilization of agriculture. It’s a familiar theme here in 
Canada, a country even richer than South Korea. Currently, 
the vast majority of farmers in the wheat belt are urging the 
general public to help them oppose the introduction of 
genetically modified grain. This is on the heels of a mad 
cow disease scare that shut down the US border and lit up 
crisis centre phone lines with calls from suicidal farmers 
across the West. Their voices deserve to be heard.

There was little mainstream press coverage of Hae’s death, 
other than a buried item here and there. News about the 
WTO itself was minimal. The media was preoccupied with 
9/11, which, with its endless speechifying, hand-wringing, 
and talk-show chatter, is in danger of being degraded from 
a horrific tragedy to a massive annual group-encounter, 
self-help session, as we endlessly ask ourselves, “Why?”

To begin to understand why, we would do well to look up 
from our navels for at least a cursory glance at what 
happened in Cancun, and ask ourselves another question: 
Who handed Lee Kyung Hae the knife? 

Cover story in The Georgia Straight, Canada's largest independent weekly

© Guy Babineau 2003-2004

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