South Korea is planning to discourage the adoption of its children abroad, Yonhap news agency Yonhap reported on Monday.

The foreign ministry estimates that about 130,000 ethnic Koreans have been adopted overseas and is now planning to enlist the help of the health ministry and Korean foundations abroad to reduce future adoptions by foreigners, an official said.

The ministry also plans to encourage adopted ethnic Koreans overseas to attend Korean language programmes to help reinforce their cultural identity.

President Kim Dae-Jung instructed the ministry to consider ways of bolstering the ethnic identity of the adopted, after an embarrassing encounter with a woman when he visited Norway some years ago.

At a meeting where Kim made a speech about human rights, the ethnic Korean woman denounced South Korea for sending her abroad as a child and asked him what he felt about the fate of people like her, the agency quoted the official as saying.

BBC Monitoring (http://www.monitor.bbc.co.uk), based in Caversham in southern England, selects and translates information from radio, television, press, news agencies and the Internet from 150 countries in more than 70 languages.