일본 및 중국의 차(茶) 산업 동향과 시사점

Abstract

우리나라 차 산업은 국민소득 향상과 함께 소비가 확대되어 급속히 성장하여 왔으나, 최근 커피를 비롯한 다양한 대용차의 개발과 소비 확대, 농약 파동 등으로 인해 차 소비는 감소로 전환되었다. 이로 인해 생산 감축과 폐농 사례가 발생하는 등 전반적으로 위축되어 차 재배면적은 정점이었던 2008년에 비해 최근 20% 이상이나 감소하였다.

이에 비해 일본은 차 문화가 정착되어 차가 이른바 국민적 음료로 취급받고 있으며, 일본인에게 매우 중요한 농산물 중의 하나로 1인당 차 소비량이 우리나라에 비해 크게 많다. 중국의 경우도 전통적인 차 소비 대국으로 매년 생산량의 2/3가량이 내수로 소비되고 있으며, 경제 발전과 소득 수준 향상, 건강에 대한 인식 확산 등으로 차 소비량은 매년 증가하고 있는 추세이다. 이 때문에 본 연구는 일본 및 중국의 차 산업 현황을 살펴본 후 벤치마킹이 가능한 부분을 도출함으로써 앞으로 국내 차 산업의 경쟁력 강화에 도움을 주고자 수행되었다.

Korea's tea industry showed high growth in domestic consumption due to the high interest in health and wellbeing trends up until the mid 2000s. However, the tea industry is currently declining due to decreased tea cultivation areas resulting from the pesticide incident of green tea and development of a variety of alternative teas. Therefore, it is important to find areas that can be benchmarked by identifying the tea industry trends of Japan and China, which are countries that have a strongly established tea consumption culture as one process for establishing plans to secure competitiveness in the tea industry and to spread the tea consumption base. Japan has a widely established tea culture and their tea consumption per person is much higher than that of Korea. It also has a tea market allowing fair pricing. Despite this, their tea cultivation area is on the decline due to the aging society and the number of processing plants is also decreasing every year. However, as small individual tea plants are being reorganized into larger tea plants, Japan's tea industry is progressing into the direction of economy of scale. Therefore, it is judged that reorganization of tea-making companies will be necessary for the economy of scale for tea processing in Korea as well. Japan has a variety of subjects regarding tea such as tea makers, agricultural cooperatives, brokers, processors and wholesalers, and retailers. However, because the tea market and agricultural cooperative participate in distribution, it is possible to guarantee fairness in forming the price of tea. Therefore, it is also necessary to improve the distribution structure of Korea to procure consumer trust through fair pricing of tea. Meanwhile, China not only possesses the largest tea farming area in the world, but also records the highest production of tea in the world, making it one of the strongest countries in terms of tea. Furthermore, based on its economic development and growing awareness of health, China's tea consumption is growing every year, and their tea processing technology has improved a great deal as well. In particular, China is the world's second biggest tea exporter and it may have a huge impact on the Korean tea industry depending on the negotiation results of the pending Korea-China FTA. Therefore, it is necessary to closely observe the tea production and export trends of China to analyze its effects on the Korea tea industry and to establish various strategies to enhance Korea's tea competitiveness. In particular, it will be necessary to actively promote the safety of Korean tea and tea-related products to differentiate Korean tea.

Researchers: Park Ki-hwan, Heo Seong-yoon, Miyabe Kazuyuki, Xu Yongmei Research period: 2013. 10. ~ 2014. 4. E-mail address: kihwan@krei.re.kr