Plunging Vegetable Prices

[Anchor Lead]

Vegetable prices have plunged in recent days due to the warm winter. Farmers are painfully discarding their crops to save labor and transport costs the best they can.

[Pkg]

In normal years, it would be busy at harvest time at this seaside cabbage patch. But this spring, there is no harvest. Damaged cabbage heads are sucked into the tractor and get broken into numerous pieces.

[Soundbite] Kim Hak-jong(Cabbage farmer) : "It's so painful. It hasn't been this challenging in the past decade."

The farmer is intentionally destroying the crop because harvesting it would bring no profits. Cabbage prices have plummeted. In Jejudo Island alone, some 22-thousand tons of cabbage have been abandoned and turned into waste. A similar situation exists with other vegetables as well.Farmers in Muan in Jeollanamdo Province, Korea's leading onion producer, have also decided to discard their produce for the second year ahead of next month's harvest.

[Soundbite] Jeong Sang-cheol(Onion farmer) : "It used to be five good years followed by a year of low prices and then bounce back again. But now, this is the 2nd year I've had to scrap my crop."

The unusually warm winter has led to bumper crops. But with consumption levels not matching up, prices have plunged. Even with crops being scrapped and the government trying to purchase some of the yield to adjust the amount of supply, vegetable prices continue to fall. A bag of onions is selling for about 13-thousand won in the wholesale market, less than half the 30-thousand won level two years ago. The cost of disposing of such vegetables has reached 50 billion won over the past five years.