Two Seeds and a Bottle of Oil

Sesame goes into Korean fields between March and May and sets its seed in July and August, according to Statistics Korea’s crop survey. Then comes the harvest. Jeju’s agricultural institute counts 32.6 hours of work to bring in 1,000 square metres of sesame by hand, and half an hour with a combine harvester and a variety bred to hold its seed, as reported on September 14.

That seed ends up in two bottles on a Korean shelf: 참기름, sesame oil, and 들기름, perilla oil. Their supply stories run in opposite directions. Korea grows about a tenth of the sesame it uses and about 71 percent of the perilla. Those are the agriculture ministry’s figures for 2024.

Since 2025 a paddy-field payment has been trying to grow the domestic side. The strategic crop payment added 깨, its single line for sesame and perilla, that year at ₩1 million a hectare, and raised the rate to ₩1.5 million for 2026. In 2025 it paid on about 800 hectares. This story follows the seed from field to label: the two crops, the border, the payment, and what the Food Code says a bottle must contain. It asks the question that closed The Bean Behind the Jang: who buys the domestic crop once a payment has grown it? It is built from official statistics, statutes and published reporting, and it does not report a farm visit or an interview.

Two crops, two directions

The long record is in the ministry’s special-crop survey. In 1995 Korean farmers grew sesame on 52,263 hectares and harvested 31,859 tonnes. In 2024 it was 18,856 hectares and 9,002 tonnes: about 64 percent less land and 72 percent less seed, by Ag Digest’s arithmetic from the same table. Perilla went the other way. It covered 36,476 hectares in 1995 and 38,390 in 2024, and its harvest rose from 26,232 tonnes to 43,889. Perilla now takes about twice the land of sesame and gives nearly five times the tonnage, because a perilla field yielded 114 kilograms per 1,000 square metres in 2024 against 48 for sesame.

Sesame also swings from year to year. The harvest was 12,986 tonnes in 2019, 6,795 in 2020, 11,679 in 2022 and 8,972 in 2023.

Then 2025 was a good year. Statistics Korea estimated about 11,000 tonnes, a fifth more than in 2024, on 19,298 hectares, which is 2.3 percent more land. The agency’s explanation has two parts. At sowing time, March to May, the wholesale price of domestic top-grade white sesame averaged ₩27,515 a kilogram, 10.7 percent more than a year earlier, according to aT, the state agro-food trade corporation. Then July and August brought 462 hours of sunshine nationwide against 388 in 2024 and 343 in 2023, and the yield rose from 48 to 56 kilograms per 1,000 square metres. That is a crop that answers to the spring price and the summer sun.

Where the sesame comes from

Imports fill the rest. The ministry’s supply balance for 2024 has 82,200 tonnes of sesame arriving against 9,000 harvested at home, about nine tonnes in for every tonne grown, by Ag Digest’s arithmetic. Customs data that Korea reports to the United Nations put 2025 imports at 95,167 tonnes, worth US$167.9 million. China (31,092 tonnes), India (26,344) and Pakistan (16,545) supplied 78 percent of it, by our arithmetic. Burkina Faso (7,300) and Nigeria (5,976) came next.

The border has a gate in it. In the ministry’s quota plan for 2025, sesame seed (customs code 1207.40) has a quota of 6,731 tonnes at a 40 percent duty and a 630 percent duty on anything above it. The quota is allocated to a designated agency: aT imports and sells the seed itself. Imports in 2024 were about twelve times that quota, by our arithmetic, and the plan does not say how the rest crossed the border. Press reports describe the government enlarging the quota volume in recent years, but this story found no official table for the current year and states no total.

Prices moved apart. Imported seed averaged about US$1.76 a kilogram at customs in 2025, 18 percent below the US$2.14 of 2024, by Ag Digest’s arithmetic from customs value and weight. Domestic seed rose rather than fell, to ₩27,515 a kilogram wholesale in spring. They are different grades in different currencies, so this story gives no ratio between them.

Perilla needs far less from abroad. The same balance has 17,800 tonnes imported against 43,900 tonnes grown in 2024, a self-sufficiency of 71.2 percent. It was 78.3 percent in 2022.

The payment that reached the seed

The strategic crop payment pays farmers to grow something other than rice in paddy fields. The soybean story tells how it began, and this one picks up at the seed. 깨 joined the list in 2025, after soybeans and Garu rice in 2023 and pulses and corn in 2024. The rate was ₩1 million a hectare in 2025 and ₩1.5 million in 2026, the same step corn received. Summer applications ran to May 29.

The first year was small. The ministry’s December 10, 2025 results show ₩816 million paid on about 800 hectares to 4,331 operators, corporations excluded. Pulses were paid on 32,100 hectares that year, about forty times as much land, by our arithmetic. Against the crops themselves it is a thin slice: roughly 1.4 percent of the 57,700 hectares of sesame in 2025 and perilla in 2024 added together, though paid land is paddy only and the programme does not split sesame from perilla.

Nothing here resembles the soybean’s trouble. In the sources read for this story there is no figure for unsold sesame or perilla, and with imports about nine times the sesame harvest, the gap has run the other way: too little domestic seed, not too much. What is not yet known is 2026. Statistics Korea published its sesame estimate in November last year, and the ministry published the 2025 paid area on December 10.

At the shelf

A bottle makes three separate promises. Pressed is a method, and the Food Code polices it. Sesame or perilla is a name, and the Food Code polices that too. The origin line says where the seed grew, and it is the only one of the three that touches the field. For sesame, about nine seeds in ten come from abroad; for perilla, about seven in ten are Korean.

The open question for the next few years is who pays what domestic seed costs. In spring 2025 that was ₩27,515 a kilogram at wholesale for top-grade white sesame, while imported seed was clearing customs at about US$1.76. Households, restaurants and oil makers may pay it, or nobody will, and the paddies will go back to rice. Next time you lift a bottle, turn it round to the origin line first. For the other half of the autumn kitchen, from cabbage in the field to the jar, read The Kimchi Table.