overview
South Korea's (Republic of Korea) export-oriented economy supports a relatively affluent society of 47 million people. Rugged mountains cover much of the country, leaving a relatively small arable land area for food production. Rice dominates crop production and has long been the staple food. Production of vegetables, fruit, and livestock grew over the last three decades, but Korea has turned increasingly to food imports to satisfy consumers' demands for greater food variety, lower prices, and convenience. South Korea is the fifth-largest market for U.S. agricultural exports. Several trade disputes reflect the country's strong drive for self-sufficiency. ERS analyzes important aspects of Korea's food and agricultural situation, its agricultural trade, and issues affecting U.S. agricultural trade.

contents

• Basic information
• Trade
• Policy
• Issues and analysis       

feature
Many factors determine the Structure of the Global Markets for Meat, including the relative availability of resources for raising and processing animals for meat. Countries' preferences for various cuts of meat provide opportunities for international trade. South Korea is one of the largest markets for U.S. meat exports.

recommended readings
Where Will Demographics Take the Asia-Pacific Food System? assesses the impact of expanded urbanization, variability in population growth and immigration, and aging populations on the Asia-Pacific food system. The ability of developing countries to adjust to rapid urbanization will be the most important demographic challenge, testing the region's capacity to deliver a steady flow of safe, reasonably priced food.

International Evidence on Food Consumption Patterns analyzes expenditures across 114 countries on major consumption categories, including food and different food subcategories. Results indicate poorer countries are more responsive to price and income changes and also allocate larger shares of their total budget to necessities such as food.

Structural Change and Agricultural Protection: Costs of Korean Agricultural Policy, 1975 and 1990 provides an overview of South Korea's agricultural policy goals and outcomes in a period of rapid economic development. Protection of agriculture skewed farmers' choices of crops and tended to retain labor in agriculture (and out of manufacturing and services), resulting in misallocation of resources. Despite the sharp decline of agriculture's importance in Korea's general economy, high import barriers continued, incurring greater costs to the economy in 1990 than in 1975.

See all recommended readings...

recommended data products
Production, Supply, and Distribution (PS&D) contains official USDA data on production, supply, and distribution of agricultural commodities for the United States and major importing and exporting countries. The database provides projections for the coming year and historical data for more than 200 countries and major crop, livestock, fishery, and forest products.

Foreign Agricultural Trade of the United States (FATUS) provides U.S. agricultural exports and imports, volume and value, by country, by commodity, and by calendar year, fiscal year, and month, for varying periods, such as 1935 to the present or 1989 to the present. Updated monthly or annually.

WTO Agricultural Trade Policy Commitments Database contains data on implementation of trade policy commitments by WTO member countries. Data on domestic support, export subsidies, and tariffs are organized for comparison across countries. This queriable database offers various options for viewing and downloading data.

Agricultural Market Access Database (AMAD) is a publicly available information tool for analyzing WTO market access issues in agriculture. It contains data and information for WTO member countries, including tariff schedules, tariff bindings, applied tariff rates, country notifications to the WTO, import quantities, and other data useful in tariff analysis.

related briefing rooms
World Trade Organization (WTO)
Agricultural baseline projections
U.S. agricultural trade

related links
Additional data and information on South Korea are available from USDA, other U.S. government sources, international organizations, Korea's government, and other sources.

for more information, contact: John Dyck
web administration: webadmin@ers.usda.gov
page updated: September 23, 2004