NORTH JEOLLA PROVINCE, South Korea _ It wasn't yet 9 a.m., but Promdeth Phonsrikaew stood sweat-soaked in the field.
He was in his third hour of picking tobacco, beginning shortly after dawn at the foot of a mountain in a sleepy South Korean town. Weaving between rows lining the gentle slope, he stooped to snap off the ripe, yellow-tinged leaves from plants as tall as he.
Nearby, Park Jong-bum took a break from heaving bales of tobacco onto a truck bed. He lit a cigarette beneath a cloudy sky. He had quit smoking last year, but the stresses of running a farm had hooked him again.
Park and Phonsrikaew were on the second chapters of their lives: Phonsrikaew a 52-year-old Thai army captain-turned-migrant farmworker, and Park, 49, a South Korean businessman who returned to his native farming village after two decades of city life.
On this day, their lives would intersect amid the crosscurrents of supply and demand in South Korea's agricultural industry: an aging, hyper-urbanized society in voracious need of farmhands, and migrant workers arriving from elsewhere in Asia to take on arduous work no longer wanted by locals.
This already tenuous balance is imperiled by a global pandemic that has sealed borders and interrupted the flow of migrant workers, leaving both farmers and farm workers desperate as crops ripen and rains loom. On this day, Park needed 10 workers to pick leaves from some 18,000 plants. He got five, including Phonsrikaew.
For 12 hours, they'll work alongside each other on one of the hottest days of the year. Then each will move on, not having learned one another's names or life stories, probably never to see one another again.
