The protein system
South Koreans are among the best-fed people in Asia. Protein supply reached 110.7 grams per person per day in 2023, and calorie supply 3,430 kcal, about one and a half times what the body needs.[5] The diet is broad. Koreans eat around 60 kilograms of seafood per person a year, three times the world average, though meat overtook seafood by volume in 2022.[4] Meat consumption is now near 60 kilograms per person: 30 kilograms of pork, 15.2 of chicken and 14.9 of beef in 2024.[10] Rice, the staple, continues its long decline, falling to 53.9 kilograms per person in 2025 from 56.4 in 2023.[2]
Domestic farms cover this diet very unevenly. In 2023 they produced 49 per cent of the country's food, a share that has fallen since 2017. Counting animal feed, they grew only 22.2 per cent of the grain used, though rice was 99.1 per cent home-grown.[1] Pork output was about 1.43 million tonnes in 2025, against imports of 739,000 tonnes in 2024. Farms now produce only 35.5 per cent of the beef eaten, and beef imports reached 580,000 tonnes in 2025.[3, 9, 10] Chicken was 83.1 per cent home-produced in 2022.[8] Fisheries and fish farms produced 3.61 million tonnes in 2024, about 57 per cent of seafood demand.[4] Filling the gaps cost about USD 46 billion of farm and food imports in 2025, more than a fifth of it from the United States.[24]
Durable domestic capacity:
Korea produces a lot of protein at home, but its livestock depend on imported feed. Rice is its strongest home-grown food. Farms grow 99.1 per cent of the rice eaten,[1] public stocks exceed a million tonnes,[18] and the country has enough spare rice to give 150,000 to 180,000 tonnes a year as food aid abroad.[2] The livestock sector is large and modern, with 10.8 million pigs, 3.3 million beef cattle and over 90 million broiler chickens at the end of 2025.[2] Coastal fish and seaweed farms produce 2.25 million tonnes a year.[4]
Korea's land, water and fish are all shrinking. Farmland fell for the eleventh year in a row to 1.512 million hectares in 2023, losing 16,000 hectares in one year to building, industry and ageing farmers.[7] The government is paying farmers to grow less rice, and output is heading down to 3.5 million tonnes in , a fifth straight fall.[2] The wild catch is also falling. Fishing in nearby waters landed 841,000 tonnes in 2024, 12 per cent below 2023 and 9 per cent below the five-year average, held back by warmer seas, shifting stocks and catch limits on fifteen species.[4] The Hanwoo beef herd fell 5.8 per cent in the year to June 2025.[3] Output remains large, but the base behind it is getting smaller.
Resource headroom:
South Korea has little land or water to spare. Arable land is about 0.03 hectares per person, and renewable freshwater, at 1,255 cubic metres per person a year in 2022, is below the level usually taken to mean water stress.[6, 7] Cropland fell 21.5 per cent and arable land 24.2 per cent between 2000 and 2024.[42] The diet adds to the pressure. Pork and chicken, the meats people are eating more of, depend almost entirely on grain and soybean meal, nearly all of it imported.[2]
Money is not the problem. Korean farms got 2.7 times their share of the economy in bank lending in 2024, up from 2.1 times in 2015, and real lending to farming, forestry and fishing rose 74 per cent over the same period.[43] Irrigation covers 51 to 54 per cent of what arable land remains. The irrigated area itself has not grown since 2017; the share has risen only because arable land has shrunk.[42] The only large programme to change how land is used cuts rice rather than adding farmland. It pays farmers to switch paddy to beans, forage and maize to reduce a rice surplus. It reached 98.5 per cent of a 127,000-hectare target in 2023, up from 44 to 53 per cent in 2011 to 2019, and a further 80,000-hectare cut was planned for 2025.[44, 45] That land is still farmed, and the 764,000 hectares of rice paddy that remain are all in use.[7]
The sea is the exception. Fish and seaweed farms supplied 62 per cent of Korea's seafood output in 2024, up from 47 per cent in 2014.[4] Most of it needs no feed, farmland or fresh water. Oyster farms produce 310,000 tonnes a year. Seaweed makes up most of the rest, 572,000 tonnes of sea mustard and 552,000 tonnes of laver, but it supplies only about 2 per cent of Korea's protein.[4, 5] Wild fish, once a source of cheap protein, are failing. East Sea squid catches fell 86 per cent between 2020 and 2023, and the coastal fleet is shrinking with them.[23]
Import exposure:
South Korea imports most of the grain it uses for food and feed. Feed maize shows how concentrated supply is. In MY2024/25, 9.31 million tonnes arrived, 57 per cent from the United States, 22 per cent from Brazil and 20 per cent from Argentina.[2] These suppliers are reliable, and their cargoes avoid the Middle East chokepoints. But a disruption in any of them would hit Korean livestock quickly.[16]
The main suppliers sit in both hemispheres, so their harvests come at different times of year. Cargoes from the Americas and Australia do not pass through Hormuz, Suez or Bab el-Mandeb. Korea has also started to own part of its supply chain. POSCO International owns 75 per cent of a 2.5-million-tonne grain terminal at Mykolaiv in Ukraine, which shipped Korea's first company-owned feed cargoes in 2020-21.[16, 27] The terminal survived the Russian invasion but works at reduced capacity.[17] Trade deals give Korea duty-free access to the United States, Australia, Canada and the EU, so it can switch between suppliers.[2]
Upstream dependence:
Korea's livestock run almost entirely on imported feed. In MY2024/25 the feed industry used 9.2 million tonnes of maize, 1.7 million tonnes of feed wheat, 2.1 million tonnes of soybean meal, 1.3 million tonnes of distillers' grains, 97 per cent of them American, and 0.9 million tonnes of palm kernel meal, all imported. Domestic surplus rice added just 345,000 tonnes.[2] Korean livestock farming is in effect a business that turns imported grain into meat.
Fertiliser supply is even more concentrated. Korea makes finished fertiliser but imports all its raw materials, and the government admits it holds no national reserves of urea, ammonia, phosphate rock or potash.[14] China supplied 97 per cent of the urea used in diesel-engine fluid when it halted exports in October 2021, and Korean trucking ground to a halt within weeks.[12] Chinese customs held cargoes again in December 2023.[13] China halted urea exports again in March 2026 and reopened them only under quota from late May.[51] Then the Gulf war hit. About 40 per cent of Korea's urea and ammonia imports normally pass through the Strait of Hormuz. A million tonnes of fertiliser were stranded on 21 ships, and world prices jumped from USD 750 to USD 1,000 a tonne.[15] That makes four supply shocks in five years. Poultry breeding stock is also imported,[8] and bird flu and African swine fever since autumn 2025 have made herds less stable.[2]
Access and affordability:
Most Koreans can afford a good diet. The World Bank estimates that 5.3 per cent in 2025 and 5.5 per cent in 2024, down from 12.2 per cent in 2017.[28] FAO puts at its 2.5 per cent reporting floor, unchanged since 2001,[29] and was 2.5 per cent, against 21.8 per cent across Asia.[30] Getting food to people is not a problem: Korea ranks 17th on the World Bank's Logistics Performance Index, level with the United States.[34]
Food prices usually rise slowly, with sharp jumps in fresh produce. Food inflation ranged from about 0.5 to 7.9 per cent between 2022 and 2026, peaking in August 2022, and was 0.9 per cent in July 2026.[41, 31] Fresh produce spikes often. Wholesale napa cabbage, the base of kimchi, cost about 128 per cent more in mid-October 2024 than a year earlier,[33] and retail prices rose 52 per cent in one month to mid-August 2025 after heatwaves and heavy rain.[32]
The national figures hide real hardship. South Korea has the highest poverty rate among people aged 65 and over in the OECD, 39.8 per cent in 2023.[35] A 2019 survey found that single people in the poorest quarter of incomes were 24 times more likely to be food insecure than those in the richest.[36] The 5.3 per cent figure understates how uneven access is.
World prices reached Korean shoppers only in part. In 2021-22 the won fell 12.9 per cent against the dollar and Korea's food prices rose 5.9 per cent, while world food prices in dollars rose 14.9 per cent.[46, 47, 48] Korean prices kept rising after world prices fell. In March 2026 they were 16.8 per cent above March 2022, while the FAO index was 19.7 per cent lower.[46, 48]
Animal disease at home now moves prices more than world markets do. A tray of 30 large eggs averaged 7,413 won in June 2026, 8.6 per cent more than in March, after bird flu culls cut daily egg output by 3.6 per cent. That is 0.72 hours of work at the minimum wage of 10,320 won an hour, or 0.77 hours at Gyeonggi Province prices.[49, 50]
Shock endurance:
Korea has the money and institutions to handle a shock. Foreign exchange reserves were USD 427.4 billion at the end of June 2026,[20] about six months of imports at mid-2026 rates.[37] That is ample to outbid other buyers for grain. Public rice stocks exceed a million tonnes against a target of 17 to 18 per cent of annual consumption,[18] and Korea is a leading donor to the ASEAN+3 Emergency Rice Reserve.[19]
It has recovered quickly from recent shocks. In the bird flu outbreaks of 2016-17 and 2020-21, each of which killed around 29 to 30 million birds, the government cut tariffs and flew in eggs, about 380 million in 2021 alone, and supply recovered within months.[21] It is doing the same again in 2026.[22] The 2021 urea crisis was solved in weeks through diplomacy, military stock releases and new suppliers, followed by subsidies to diversify supply and larger public urea reserves.[13] The agriculture ministry reported in March 2026 that fertiliser supply had held up despite the Gulf closure.[15]
Its ability to pay for imports in a crisis is strong. S&P rates Korea AA with a stable outlook,[38] and government debt was 49 per cent of GDP in 2025,[39] so the state can borrow on better terms than most importers. In 2020 an emergency payment reached all 14 million households within weeks of the COVID shock, funded by a 12.2 trillion won supplementary budget and paid mostly as local shopping vouchers.[40] It was Korea's first universal household payment and showed support can scale up fast. But Korea holds no strategic feed grain. A long break in feed imports would force farmers to cull herds within months, and no amount of money could quickly replace a feed supply of 21 million tonnes a year. Protein supply of 110.7 grams per person per day is nearly double what people need.
Trajectory
Policy targets the right problems but is short of money. The goal of producing 55.5 per cent of the country's food has slipped from 2027 to 2029.[1] The wheat target was cut in 2026 from 10 to 8 per cent by 2030, or 200,000 tonnes, while actual output is nearer 40,000 tonnes, 1 to 2 per cent of use.[2] Farmland is still being lost at about 1 per cent a year, with no plan to reverse it.[7] The steps that would help most are clear: a strategic feed-grain reserve alongside the rice stock; national stocks of urea, ammonia, phosphate and potash, now under review after repeated shocks;[14] more company-owned supply abroad beyond the damaged Mykolaiv terminal;[16, 17] and more seaweed and shellfish farming, the one protein source Korea can grow without imported inputs.[4] Without them, Korea's food system will stay well run but dependent on inputs it does not control.