Starting next year, duty-free...American 'Mandarin' will flood in.

Starting next year, U.S. mandarins will be subject to no tariffs, drawing attention to the potential impact on the consumption and prices of Jeju mandarins. According to Jeju Special Self-Governing Province on the 3rd, since the enforcement of the Korea-U.S. Free Trade Agreement (FTA) in 2012, the import tariff rate for U.S. mandarins has been gradually reduced by 9.6% annually from 144%. Next year, on the 15th anniversary, the import tariff will be eliminated. As the tariff rate has decreased, the volume of imported mandarins has increased. The volume of U.S. mandarin imports was only 0.1 tons in 2017, but it increased significantly to 8.3 tons in 2018, 152.1 tons in 2019, 511.8 tons in 2020, 728.5 tons in 2021, 512 tons in 2022, and 728 tons in 2023. Last year, when the tariff rate fell below 20%, 3,099 tons were imported, more than four times the volume of the previous year. This year, with the tariff rate at 9.5%, 7,916 tons of mandarins were imported in the first half alone, ...