Following onions, garlic and peppers also succumb to foreign imports.

In the domestic wholesale market, as domestic onions are gradually being outpaced by foreign ones, there is a diagnosis that the domestic onion market has been handed over to China. Furthermore, experts warn that this price reversal phenomenon will spread across the entire seasoning vegetable market, including garlic and dried chili peppers. While the seasoning vegetable market has steadily shifted from being primarily for household use to being centered around corporate use, it is pointed out that this change has been exacerbated because the producing areas and the government have not adequately responded. According to the ‘Agriculture Outlook 2026’ released by the Korea Rural Economic Institute earlier this year, by 2025, the combined proportion of manufacturing and industrial use, referred to as corporate use (73.5%), will be approximately three times that of household use (26.5%). In particular, household consumption is expected to decrease by 3.4 percentage points from 2024 ...