South Korea's Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs, whose minister is Kim Hyun-soo, is promoting the "Project for Supporting Ecological Agricultural Materials" to 17 cities and provinces across the country.

Last year, the South Korean Ministry of Agriculture and Food provided around 268 million tonnes of organic fertilizers and around 450,000 tonnes of soil improvers for agricultural management through the "Support Project for Ecological Agricultural Materials".

This evaluation is performed to verify the overall progress of the project by local governments dealing with large volumes of projects and to induce efforts to improve the soil environment.

The evaluation of the "Support Project for Ecological Agricultural Materials" has been scheduled every year since 2016, helping to improve business performance. As an example, as the performance of local government budget execution improves, the utilization rate of organic fertilizer support projects is constantly decreasing, with the utilization rate of the fertilizer support project budget being organic 4.8% in 2017, 4.6% in 2018 and 4.3% in 2019.

In addition, Jeollanam-do, which was selected as an excellent organization, shared best practices, such as training activities on organic fertilizers and on-site inspections with other local governments.

The evaluation of the "Project to support environmentally friendly agricultural materials" is determined by summarizing the results of the numerical evaluation of yield data, which include elements of adaptation of the soil environment, rate of emission of fertilization measures for the soil test, soil improver joint spray rate, chemical fertilizer use reduction rate, educational / promotional performance, budget implementation efforts such as chemical fertilizer use reduction rate, and performed by selecting a experienced independent evaluation agency; and the qualitative evaluation of the evaluation committee (such as the efforts of the local government, the will of the head of the local government, etc.), which is planned to be strictly managed so that a fair evaluation can be made by forming an evaluation committee with experts and conducting on-site deliberations if necessary.

The Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs said it plans to use the results of the evaluation to allocate up to 7% of the budget for the project to support organic fertilizers by city and province in 2021, to provide excellent incentives to cities and provinces.