Food Self-Sufficiency Rate Falling

Park Seong-jun, a 33-year-old office worker, had locally produced bean sprout soup for breakfast yesterday.

Chances are, the beans his sprouts were grown from were imported, since locally farmed beans make up only 7.1 percent of the nation’s total. More than half of Korea’s bean sprouts, 56.3 percent, come from the United States.

The self-sufficiency rate for Park’s saury (a popular fish) lunch was 45.5 percent, and the rate for the fillet of beef he had with soju (a Korean alcohol) for dinner was 44.2 percent. A total of 82 percent of Korea’s saury and 70.9 percent of its beef are imported from Taiwan and Australia, respectively.

Rice, the staple food of Korea, is 94.3 percent (including processed rice) locally produced. However, Korea’s rice self-sufficiency rate will also begin to go down this year starting next month after restrictions on imports of rice for both cooking meals and processing are lifted.

“I never knew how little of these foods were produced in Korea,” said Park.

Faced with the tidal wave of globalization, the Korean saying: “The body and the land are one,” meaning locally grown food is best for the body, is fast becoming history. Now Koreans sit down at meals to eat food produced in all corners of the world.

Food Self-Sufficiency Rate: 60%-

In a “2004 Food Demand and Supply Table” recently released by Korea Rural Economics Institute (KREI), the average self-sufficiency rate of the 210 most consumed foodstuffs in Korea is 60 percent in terms of volume. This means that a little more than one meal out of the three meals in a day is produced abroad.

When calculated in terms of calories, Korea’s food self-sufficiency rate drops to less than half, 46.7 percent. This is more than 30 percent points less than the 79.5 percent rate recorded in 1970.

The reason for this is that while Korea’s food self-sufficiency rate in low-calorie foods such as vegetables, seaweeds and fruits is as high as 80 to 100 percent, that of grain, which is high in calories, is only around 27.6 percent.

A gradual fall-

The domestic consumption of wheat in 2004 was 3.16 million tons. As people eat more bread and noodles, however, wheat consumption has grown to 67 percent of the consumption of rice, which stands at 4.72 million tons. But locally produced wheat only accounts for 0.4 percent of the total.

Foods such as corn (0.8 percent), sesame oil (20.6 percent) and red beans (18.2 percent) are also very low in terms of self-sufficiency rates. A total of 68.2 percent of all corn consumed in Korea comes from China, and even wild greens have a lower-than-half self-sufficiency rate of 42.8 percent.

Only 4.9 percent of Alaskan Pollack, a popular fish in Korea, and 29.2 percent of yellow corvina are caught in Korean waters. Alaskan Pollack is mostly imported from Russia, and yellow corvina from China.

Experts believe that Korea’s food self-sufficiency is likely to continue its decline in the future.

“If the government leaves this unchecked, food self-sufficiency will fall by an additional 10 percent,” KREI researcher Choi Ji-hyun predicts.

This means that in a decade, two out of the three meals a day in terms of calories will be produced from other countries.

Sun-Woo Kim Jae-Young Kim sublime@donga.com jaykim@donga.com