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It is clear that quality issues have become more central features of agro-food studies. The studies have been conducted in several disciplines with different approaches respectively. Four major approaches of agro-food quality were reviewed in this paper. Consumer interface approaches focus on the interface between the consumer and the manufacturer or seller of the agro-food product. These approaches seek to explain how consumers' perceptions and information environments influence the way that agro-food market works. Quality perception approaches were developed within the studies of marketing, consumer behavior, and applied psychology. The aim of these studies is to understand the process in which consumers perceive quality of agro-foods and then make decisions to purchase. Rural sociologists have given attention to the social process in which the quality of agro-food is constructed. In the discourse of rural development, the effects of quality certification on the agro-foods, whose special quality attributes are embedded in particular geographical contexts, have mainly been discussed.

The purpose of this study is to explore the socio-economic characteristics and their policy implications of agro-touristic farm households in rural Korea. The data were collected by questionnaire and obtained from 104 agro-touristic farmers and 104 village people in twenty two rural villages from April 20, 2002 to November 21, 2002 and analyzed. With the research results, it has been shown that, even Korean government's efforts to diversify farm management somewhat contributed to improve small farms' income, it was difficult for farm householders to grow their businesses continuously due to the following restrictions; 1) the age of farm managers were old to expand their new businesses, 2) the pluriactivities of agro-touristic farm households were not enough to supplement their income, and 3) they were not so much willing to take the risk from expanding the scale of agro-touristic business. As such, we suggested that the governments' policy makers consider to establish the policy goal of the rural tourism projects reasonably.