It’s that season again when the ubiquitous Jeju mandarin orange is ripening and the harvest is underway. This week in Jeju: A to Z, Todd Thacker takes a brief look at the ins and outs of this economically important Jeju crop.




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Driving around the island, and especially Seogwipo City, you’ll find orchard after orchard of delicious mandarin oranges ripening on drooping branches. But it wasn’t always that way.

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Farmers encouraged to grow mandarins from 1960s

In the late 1960s, the government started offering Jeju farmers financial incentives to choose the mandarin. Their campaign proved very effective.

Between 1966 and 1971, the amount of land put to use as mandarin orchards went from just 63 hectares to over 5,700 hectares.

More recently, in the last decade or so mandarin production generated nearly half of all the agricultural income for Jeju.

The annual outdoor mandarin crop for Jeju totals around 100 kilograms of mandarins for every citizen of South Korea, or around 500,000 tons.

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Market forces driving down prices, demand for Jeju mandarins

Still, global market forces have started to cast a shadow on the mandarin’s heyday. In 1997, Korea dropped absolute quotas on imported oranges from the U.S. Other FTAs have also since been signed.

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Todd Thacker

In response to the drop in demand, the government has been asking farmers to switch to other crops. So while the mandarin is still a staple winter fruit and generates substantial income for the province, it looks like farmers will have to concentrate on the next big thing.

Todd Thacker KCTV