This research is about increasing Korean agro-food products export to foreign market. This is the first year draft from 2 year research project. The main purpose of this research is to support export policy of domestic agro-food products. To meet the end, the study mainly focuses on general export policies and institutional improvement. Previous agro-food export studies usually deal with a specific food item or country while this research addresses multiple items and countries. Especially, the first year draft deals with main export items and markets.
This report describes a current condition of agro-food export market, and points out its important characteristics and inherent problems. Also analyzes the competitiveness of domestic agro-food products in five important export markets. In this research, foreign consumers’ preferences toward domestic vegetables, flowers, and fruits are surveyed. The survey results are utilized to derive necessary policies and its future directions to increase export markets.
This research categorizes agro-food export system into six different stages and suggests policy recommendations to increase export to foreign markets on each stage. Firstly, in the production stage, it is difficult to secure the sufficient quantities and proper qualities. Not enough room for price negotiation is also a problem. To solve the problems, organizing farm to scale and government’s expenditure on R&D investment is necessary. In the commercializing stage, poor conditioned facilities and inadequate adoption of buyers’ requirements cause problems. These can be solved by providing new facilities to improve products' qualities with fostering export-specialized farms.
In the export logistics stage, a lack of cold-chain system and an inefficient logistics system cause decreasing quality and increasing managerial cost problems. Also governmental export logistic subsidies cause an unnecessary side effect. Providing a proper logistic system with a new subsidy scheme is strongly recommended to enhance efficiency. In the quarantine and customs clearance stage, the government has to make a mutual agreement with the importing country to alleviate an existing strict quarantine system.
In the stage of distribution in the importing countries, excessive price competitions between exporting companies cause several drawbacks such as damaging the image and price war. The government has to monitor exporting companies effectively to secure an existing market with proper policies. Finally, foreign consumers’ lack of brand awareness has to be changed. Currently, the main target customer of exporting agro-food products is overseas Korean. Supports on participating overseas food exhibitions and brand promotions, and entering local large-scale retailers are strongly recommended.

Researchers : Myong-keun Eor, Ki-Hwan Park, Eun-Mi Jeong, Kyung-Phil Kim, Byung-Joon Woo, Hyun-Joong Kim, Dae-Hee Chung, Ho-Seok Han
E-mail address : myongeor@krei.re.kr