The Current Situation and Policy Direction of Agroforestry in Korea

This study tried to find the way of encouraging agroforestry practices in Korea by way of investigating current situations of agroforestry and finding the problems of performing policies for agroforestry. Agroforestry started as a name of "a complex management of forest for multiple uses" in Korea began in the year of 1999 in order to provide interim incomes to the owners of forest who were mostly suffered by the lack of incomes from the investment of forests. Most of investors in agroforestry felt that financial supports from the government were always insufficient especially needed after the first year of investments established. They also complained the process of administration were slow and out of date in many cases. The code of practices of individual agroforestry models should be developed and distributed by way of educating forest owners. In order to activate agroforestry practices, regional agroforestry clusters can be a solution of acquiring economies of scale and value adding processes by processing a large amount of agroforestry products in the confined area.