South Korea: Jeollanam-do to foster individual oysters as high value-added export products

Jeollanam-do recently announced that it is aiming to achieve a fishery income of KRW 60 billion by 2025 by investing KRW 17 billion to expand the aquaculture base in order to stably produce individual oysters, which are recently spotlighted as a new high value-added aquaculture variety. Because individual oysters have excellent taste and flavor and are rich in mineral nutrients, they are traded at a price 5 to 10 times higher than that of truncated oysters that are currently farmed in a general form. The entire 150 tons of annual production in Jeollanam-do is exported to China, Taiwan and Hong Kong. However, individual oysters require a lot of initial equipment cost for aquaculture. For this reason, Jeollanam-do will spend 17.2 billion won to support 50 eco-friendly oyster farms, and plan to expand the current 43ha oyster farm to 500ha by 2025. It also supports the acquisition of specialized skills, such as expanding education on aquaculture techniques such as culturing individual oyster seeds for full-time fishermen and ear fishermen. It is also planning to increase exports by managing the area where individual oyster farms are concentrated as a shellfish production area designated by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for export.