This summer, heat waves, drought and sudden downpours have battered the country. Extreme rainfall recently struck Geoje in South Gyeongsang Province, triggering a wave of landslides and flooding. A summer's worth of rain fell all at once over just three days. Right up until the downpour, severe heat and drought had prevailed. Some areas saw temperatures climb to 42.5 degrees Celsius early this month, and Seoul became hotter than Bangkok, Thailand, and Hanoi, Vietnam. Alongside the deluge, a grueling summer drags on — scorching heat by day and tropical nights that make sleep impossible.
Climate disasters are directly tied to the cost of food on the table. Record-breaking heat and drought have caused mounting crop damage, and high water temperatures have led to successive die-offs of farmed fish. In line with the government's response, the Korea Agro-Fisheries & Food Trade Corporation (aT) is urgently supplying stockpiled produce such as cabbage and radish to the market, and it is continuing a program offering discounts of up to 40% on agricultural and livestock products, aiming to carry it through the Chuseok peak season. The goal is to stabilize supply and demand for produce while easing, if only a little, the burden on households' grocery baskets.
We are entering an era of climate crisis, an era in which food itself is a weapon. To secure food supplies amid the climate crisis, aT already created a dedicated climate crisis response department in August 2024 and established seven directions for innovation to address climate change, under which it is pursuing detailed projects. This stems from an urgent recognition that responding to climate change must be the top priority in safeguarding food security. Specifically, the seven directions are: shifting to eco-friendly, low-carbon farming and fisheries; improving seeds and developing new varieties; building cold-storage stockpiling bases; improving distribution structures (online wholesale markets and direct-trade markets); shifting the concept of the national staple from rice alone to five grains (rice, soybeans, wheat, corn and barley) for an age when food is weaponized; statistics-based agriculture and year-round smart farms; and expanding Korea's food footprint through exports of agricultural, fisheries and livestock products (K-food).
In particular, aT is making an all-out effort to strengthen its capacity to stockpile produce in order to bolster food security in this age of climate crisis. It stockpiles and manages an annual average of about 230,000 tons of produce (as of 2025) — including soybeans, wheat, cabbage, radish, onions and garlic — that are closely tied to daily life. That is more than double the annual average of 95,000 tons in 2022. It is also making its utmost effort to manage supply and stabilize prices by upgrading supply-and-demand systems such as stockpiling bases, so that produce can be stockpiled and supplied systematically and nimbly in step with conditions at production sites and in consumer markets.
For example, aT is working with the National Institute of Agricultural Sciences on a project to improve the long-term storage of produce using Controlled Atmosphere (CA) technology, so that cabbage and other crops can be supplied stably even amid abnormal weather. The technology precisely controls oxygen and carbon dioxide levels inside storage warehouses, dramatically extending the storage life and freshness of produce. With abnormal weather such as heat waves and drought causing difficulties even in highland cultivation areas, the project aims to resolve supply-and-demand instability by securing stable production and storage technology. In June this year, aT and the institute signed a mutual memorandum of understanding (MOU) combining aT's stockpiling and distribution capabilities with the institute's agricultural information and technology, building a practical cooperation framework that links climate crisis response technology to produce supply and demand.
Now more than ever, the public's attention is needed to safeguard food security amid climate disasters. In an age of climate crisis, food is a weapon. Only when the farming and fishing communities and farmers, fishers and livestock producers who feed 52 million Koreans can prosper will Korea become a strong, sustainable and advanced nation.
