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When a type of cuisine is associated with national pride, the importance of it can be something more than a line of numbers on news board.
Like wine to the French or kungpao chicken to the Chinese, kimchi - a kind of pickled cabbage - is one of the jewels on the Republic of Korea’s cultural crown, the making of which had been listed as the UNESCO Intangible Heritage towards the end of 2017.
Imagine the shock when Korean consumers learned that they had been importing more of their nationally beloved food than they had actually sold abroad.
According to the Korea Customs Service, the country’s kimchi trade deficit reached 47.28 million US dollars in 2017, up 11 percent from 2016, setting a new record for the first time since 2000.
People make kimchi, a traditional pungent vegetable dish, which is donated to the poor in preparation for winter on Nov. 3, 2017 in Seoul, South Korea.
The office’s data showed that 275,631 tons of the fermented dish were imported to the ROK while the total export was 24,311 tons.
“Notably, 99 percent of the imports were from China”, the Yonhap News agency reported on Wednesday.
But the Chinese products don't seem to be dominating dinner tables in the ROK, according to a 2016 study by the World Institute of Kimchi, a “government-funded research institute established to perform research and development related to kimchi”.
“13.7 percent of the kimchi consumed in Korea was imported. Some 47 percent of the kimchi served at restaurants and cafeterias was from abroad, with 90 percent of it from China.”
The deficit is partly attributable to the import-export price deficiency, said a report by Korea Agro-Fisheries & Food Trade Corp. By the end of 2016, the export price of kimchi was 3.36 US dollars per kilogram whereas the import cost was only 0.5 US dollars per kilogram.
Kimchi served in small dish.
The report also credited the sour relations between Seoul and Tokyo, together with the low consumption of kimchi in Japan, as a reason for the drop in the side dish’s exports to the world’s third largest economy.
The Korean cuisine is also consumed in Japan where, like the ROK, the main food staple is steamed rice with which works well with the sour and spicy flavor of kimchi.
The latest fallout between the two countries over the issue of “comfort women”, which refers to the women who were forced into sexual slavery by the invading Japanese army during World War II, has created new tensions that had seemingly been appeased after a deal was reached on the issue in 2015.
(CGTN)
