Korea's tea industry showed high growth in domestic consumption due to the high interest in health and wellbeing trends up until the mid 2000s. However, the tea industry is currently declining due to decreased tea cultivation areas resulting from the pesticide incident of green tea and development of a variety of alternative teas. Therefore, it is important to find areas that can be benchmarked by identifying the tea industry trends of Japan and China, which are countries that have a strongly established tea consumption culture as one process for establishing plans to secure competitiveness in the tea industry and to spread the tea consumption base.
Japan has a widely established tea culture and their tea consumption per person is much higher than that of Korea. It also has a tea market allowing fair pricing. Despite this, their tea cultivation area is on the decline due to the aging society and the number of processing plants is also decreasing every year. However, as small individual tea plants are being reorganized into larger tea plants, Japan's tea industry is progressing into the direction of economy of scale. Therefore, it is judged that reorganization of tea-making companies will be necessary for the economy of scale for tea processing in Korea as well.
Japan has a variety of subjects regarding tea such as tea makers, agricultural cooperatives, brokers, processors and wholesalers, and retailers. However, because the tea market and agricultural cooperative participate in distribution, it is possible to guarantee fairness in forming the price of tea. Therefore, it is also necessary to improve the distribution structure of Korea to procure consumer trust through fair pricing of tea.
Meanwhile, China not only possesses the largest tea farming area in the world, but also records the highest production of tea in the world, making it one of the strongest countries in terms of tea. Furthermore, based on its economic development and growing awareness of health, China's tea consumption is growing every year, and their tea processing technology has improved a great deal as well. In particular, China is the world's second biggest tea exporter and it may have a huge impact on the Korean tea industry depending on the negotiation results of the pending Korea-China FTA.
Therefore, it is necessary to closely observe the tea production and export trends of China to analyze its effects on the Korea tea industry and to establish various strategies to enhance Korea's tea competitiveness. In particular, it will be necessary to actively promote the safety of Korean tea and tea-related products to differentiate Korean tea.


Researchers: Park Ki-hwan, Heo Seong-yoon,
Miyabe Kazuyuki, Xu Yongmei
Research period: 2013. 10. ~ 2014. 4.
E-mail address: kihwan@krei.re.kr