President Lee: "Our Sweet Persimmons Take First Steps into Chinese Market ... Exported After 17 Years of Talks"

"New Opportunities for Our Farmers; We Will Support Efforts to Develop Export Markets"

President Lee Jae-myung said on November 7, “After 17 years of quarantine negotiations, our sweet persimmons will finally be exported to the Chinese market for the first time.”

“Our sweet persimmons are taking their first steps into the Chinese market,” Lee said in a post on X (formerly Twitter) that day.

President Lee Jaemyung and Chinese President Xi Jinping pose for a commemorative photo ahead of their Korea-China summit at the Gyeongju National Museum in North Gyeongsang Province on Nov. 1, 2025. Yonhap News

“As our export markets, which have so far focused on Southeast Asia, expand to China, new opportunities are opening up for our farmers,” Lee said. “Diversifying our export destinations will reduce our dependence on any one market and allow us to introduce our agricultural products to more consumers.”

He added, “We will actively support efforts to develop new export markets so that more of the agricultural products carefully grown by our farmers can be sold and farm household incomes can rise.”

According to the Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs, the first shipment will total about 19.6 metric tons (1,960 boxes), equivalent to one 40-foot container. It is scheduled to depart from Busan Port and arrive in Shanghai on November 10.

In November 2025, South Korea and China reached a memorandum of understanding on exports of Korean persimmons during a summit held on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Gyeongju.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.