April 9, 2008

South Korea's grain sufficiency ranks among lowest

A recent study said that South Korea ranks near bottom among 29 countries in grain self-sufficiency.
 
With 29 member countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), South Korea ranked 26th with a sufficiency rate of 25.3 percent in 2003, according to Kim Tae-gon, a fellow researcher at the Korea Rural Economic Institute.
 

South Korea ranked near the bottom alongside 27th-ranking Japan with 22.4 percent and 28th-ranking Netherlands with 21.2 percent.

On the contrary, 13 countries had rates of more than 100 percent, including France with 329 percent, Czech Republic with 198.6 percent, and Hungary with 153.7 percent.

Kim pointed out that China, Japan and South Korea, which have relatively small amounts of farmland per capita, relatively high national incomes, and large populations, are competing with each other to import grain from a small number of grain exporters, including the US, Canada, Brazil and Argentina.