A 1977 Banana Bunch = 27.5 Bowls of Jajangmyeon — and How Jeju Bananas Vanished in Four Years

April 1977. The display window of some fruit shop.

Inside the glass, in the best spot, sits a bunch of bananas. Sixteen of them. The price tag reads 5,500 won.

Same season, same city — at a Chinese restaurant, a bowl of jajangmyeon was 200 won.

The math is simple. Divide 5,500 by 200 and you get 27.5. A single bunch of bananas could buy twenty-seven and a half bowls of jajangmyeon. Take it banana by banana and each one was about ₩343 — a single banana cost more than one and a half bowls.

This article starts with that number. But it doesn’t end in the past.

In 2026, at a Korean convenience store, bananas sit on the cheapest fruit shelf. That reversal didn’t happen on its own. There’s an exact date behind it, an industry that died because of that date, and the very same thing now unfolding with a different fruit.

Was a 1977 Banana Bunch Really Worth 27 Bowls of Jajangmyeon?

Yes. But we should separate what’s verified from what’s calculated in that sentence.

Two numbers are confirmed: a 16-banana bunch cost ₩5,500 in April 1977, and a bowl of jajangmyeon cost ₩200 at the same time. Both appear in a Kukmin Ilbo feature on bananas. The 27.5-bowl figure is simply the result of dividing those two numbers — not a statistic this article invented.

27.5bowls

The comparison works because jajangmyeon was the most common dining-out meal in Korea at the time. That’s also why Korean media still uses it as a benchmark when translating prices into something tangible. A Kyunghyang Shinmun article citing Korea Consumer Agency price data shows how the dish moved.

🍌 The price of a bowl of jajangmyeon as a benchmark (by year, citing Korea Consumer Agency data)

Year	A bowl of jajangmyeon	Equivalent in 1977 banana bunches (₩5,500)
1970	₩100	55 bowls
1977	₩200	27.5 bowls
1990	around ₩1,000	about 5 bowls
2023	₩6,361	0.86 bowls

The bottom row sums up the whole article. The ₩5,500 of a 1977 banana bunch wouldn’t even buy one bowl of jajangmyeon in 2023. The price of jajangmyeon rose 63-fold from 1970 to 2023. The price of bananas went the other way.

There’s also a different account of the same era. A 2026 column described a 1970s banana bunch as worth ten bowls of jajangmyeon — which doesn’t match the Kukmin Ilbo’s measured 1977 price. This article goes with the number that has an actual price tag behind it.

There’s also a record from 1982. Though it’s a different kind.

Why Were Bananas So Expensive?

Because imports weren’t free. Beyond that, this article won’t overstate.

Bananas don’t grow in Korea. The climate doesn’t suit them. So what sets their price isn’t farming — it’s trade. The very fact that multiple outlets record January 1991, full import liberalization, as a turning point means imports weren’t free before that.

The problem is the specific form of those restrictions. Which law, which quota, from which year — this article couldn’t confirm. So it only records the confirmed outcome: before January 1991, bananas were not a common item in Korea, and the 1977 price tag shows that state of affairs.

There are two stories Koreans usually add at this point. Neither appears here.

One more number puts the distance of that era into view. Korea’s per-capita GDP was about $300 in the 1970s and about $36,000 in 2025. The income of the person standing in front of that 1977 display differed from today by a double-digit multiple. It might be more accurate to say everything was expensive, not just bananas. But among everything, bananas were especially expensive.

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Did Jeju Really Live Off Bananas?

It did. And that story is the spine of this article.

In 1989, Jeju’s banana acreage was 443ha. A Jeju regional paper wrote the same area as 4.4 million square meters. Output was 20,000 tons. And at the time, Jeju called bananas this: the island’s top cash crop.

Block imports and prices stay high; keep prices high and someone will grow it. Jeju winters are mild, and cover the crop with vinyl greenhouses and subtropical plants survive. Jeju farmers planting bananas in the 1980s wasn’t sentiment — it was arithmetic. If it can be grown domestically, imports are restricted, and the price sits in the twenty-some-bowls-of-jajangmyeon range, it was the best investment of the moment.

The order of what happened next is brutal.

🍌 The rise and fall of Jeju bananas — four years from peak to extinction (1989–1993)

When	What happened	Confirmed figure
1989	Peak of Jeju bananas. Called the island’s top cash crop	443ha (4.4 million m²), output 20,000 tons
Jan 1991	Full import liberalization of bananas	Retail price comparison before/after liberalization unconfirmed
1993	Jeju bananas vanish	Pushed out by imports
1993–1994	Uruguay Round conclusion accelerates farm-market opening	Year descriptions differ by outlet

The distance between the line recording the peak’s acreage and output, and the line recording its disappearance, isn’t four lines — it’s four years.

443ha isn’t an abstract number. Inside it were farms that had built greenhouses, the loans that went into those greenhouses, and plans to repay those loans with banana harvests. After January 1991, the premise of those plans disappeared. Bananas shipped in from the Philippines and bananas grown in heated vinyl greenhouses on Jeju had cost structures that were never the same game.

One thing needs to be made clear. Deciding who was at fault for Jeju bananas’ disappearance is not this article’s job. Thanks to liberalization, every Korean consumer now eats bananas cheaply. That’s a fact. At the same time, 443ha disappeared. That’s also a fact. The two facts don’t cancel each other out.

Are Jeju Bananas Completely Gone Now?

No. They’re back. Tiny, and very expensive.

Jeju’s banana greenhouses grew from 2 farms and 10,000 m² in 2015 to 10 farms and 55,000 m² in 2017. That’s 5.5× in two years. In 2017, the price was ₩7,000/kg for Jeju-grown versus ₩3,500/kg for imports — exactly double. One Jeju farm harvests about 200 tons a year from 37,474 m² (15,420 pyeong).

55,000 m² is 1.2% of 1989’s 443ha — that is, 4.43 million m². Not an industry. A niche.

This number matters most in this section. The fact that it sells at three times the price is interesting, but more important is the three-fold gap itself.

It means the price gap that opened in January 1991 still exists 35 years later. It’s not that Jeju farmers are lazy. A heated subtropical greenhouse operation and a vast farm near the equator were never the same cost game to begin with. Liberalization carried that difference straight into consumer prices, and nothing has reversed it since.

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When Did Bananas Become Korea’s No. 1 Fruit?

Early 2010s. And the victory came against domestic fruit.

After 1991 liberalization, banana imports moved like a thermometer of the Korean economy.

🍌 Banana imports and the Korean economy — 30 years after liberalization (1997–2022, Korea Customs Service and others)

Year	Imports	Context
1997	135,000 tons	Just before the financial crisis
1998	85,000 tons	Just after; a sharp drop in a single year
2008	50,000 tons down from the previous year	Global financial crisis
2010	337,000 tons	Up 80,000 tons year-on-year
2011	about 357,000 tons	No. 1 in big-box fruit sales for two straight years
2012	₩26 billion in sales	No. 1 fruit by sales at one big-box chain
2018	427,260 tons	44.9% of total fruit imports of 895,290 tons
2022	319,852 tons	Down 25.1% from 2018

Look at the drop between 1997 and 1998 — from 135,000 tons to 85,000 tons. When the financial crisis hit, bananas were among the first items Korean households cut. 2008 shows the same pattern. Imported fruit was not a necessity.

But in the 2010s, its character changed. In 2012, banana sales at one big-box chain hit ₩26 billion, the No. 1 fruit — ahead of domestic apples, pears, mandarins, and even oranges and cherries whose prices had fallen under free-trade agreements.

The 2018 statistics show the scale of that dominance.

The fruit that had been worth 27.5 bowls of jajangmyeon in 1977 made up nearly half of imported fruit by 2018. The reversal was complete.

The problem is the table’s last row.

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But Are Bananas Already Falling, Too?

Yes. It’s the most unexpected part of this article.

Bananas weren’t pushed out by other fruit. Koreans simply started eating less fruit.

Per-capita annual fruit consumption in Korea fell from 59.8kg in 2015 to 51.5kg in 2020. That’s 8.3kg over five years.

-8.3kg

Convert it to a daily figure and it’s like eating one fewer piece of fruit every day. And the decline wasn’t even. The fruits that shrank and the fruits that grew split into two clear camps.

🍌 Imported fruit by item — 2022 vs 2018 (Korea Customs Service)

Item	2018	2022	Change
Bananas	427,260 t	319,852 t	-25.1%
Oranges	142,443 t	77,787 t	about -50%
Pineapples	77,520 t	67,104 t	-13.4%
Kiwis	32,922 t	44,351 t	+34.7%
Mangoes	16,954 t	23,198 t	+36.8%
Strawberries	n/a	12,217 t	about +40%

Cheap fruit shrank and expensive fruit grew. The Seoul Economic Daily’s phrase for this structural shift is precise: eating less, but eating pricier fruit.

You can also point the direction another way: sweetness. By Rural Development Administration standards, oranges are about 11 Brix, mangoes 15–16 Brix, kiwis 16–17 Brix. What shrank was less sweet; what grew was sweeter. Peruvian mango imports rose 60% from 13,426 tons in 2017 to 22,291 tons in 2021.

Bananas won because they got cheap in 1991. In the 2020s, they’re being pushed out for being cheap. The condition of victory became the condition of defeat.

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Was Price the Reason Koreans Abandoned Apples and Pears?

No. It was the knife.

The cause sits in a slightly unexpected place. In April 2018, the prices of Korea’s two flagship domestic fruits collapsed at the same time.

And one sentence attached to pears weighs more than any other statistic in this article. Pears were pushed out of the fruit sales top 10 long ago.

Knowing what a pear means in Korea changes the weight of that sentence. It’s the fruit placed on ancestral ritual tables, the centerpiece of holiday gift sets, and the fruit used to tenderize meat in Korean cooking. That pear is outside the top 10 in sales.

10th place — outside

The industry analysis at the time didn’t point to price. Consumption, it said, had shifted toward strawberries and bananas — fruit you don’t need a knife for, with soft texture.

This one sentence holds the real engine of Korea’s fruit-consumption reversal.

• Apples and pears need a knife. You peel them, cut them, use a cutting board, throw away the skin.
• Bananas peel by hand. No tools. No dishes to wash.
• Strawberries — wash and eat as-is. Not even a peel.

As single-person households grow, lunch is eaten at an office desk, and fruit shifts from an after-meal dessert to a snack, this difference becomes decisive. Fewer people are buying a 5kg box of apples and peeling one every day.

In other words, what reversed Korea’s fruit consumption wasn’t tariff rates or exchange rates — it was the effort your hands had to make. If 1991 liberalization gave bananas their price, the lifestyle changes of the 2010s gave bananas their victory.

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Is Korea Watching Season 2 of the Same Drama in 2026?

Yes. This time the lead is the mandarin.

When the Korea–US free-trade agreement took effect in 2012, the tariff on US mandarins (citrus) began stepping down from as high as 144%. And from 2026, it’s zero. The import trend looks like this.

🍌 US mandarin (citrus) imports — from tariff cuts to zero tariffs (2017–2026)

Year	Imports	Note
2017	0.1 t	practically none
2022	529 t	staged tariff-reduction period
2023	586 t	small increase
2024	2,875 t	about 5× in a single year
2025 (through Aug)	7,619 t	2.6× the previous year’s total in eight months
2026	16,000 t forecast	tariff from up to 144% to zero

From 0.1 tons to 16,000 tons. A 160,000-fold increase in nine years.

And the headline of the January 2026 Hankook Ilbo article reporting this statistic makes this article’s conclusion for it.

What matters is that the headline carries no explanation. To a Korean reader, the phrase the banana’s path works without a footnote. The premise is that everyone already knows what happened in 1991, and what became of 443ha in four years.

Korean media remember the 1991 banana as the archetype of liberalization. Thirty-five years later, that memory shows up verbatim in the headline of an article about a different fruit.

Jeju is already preparing. About 20% of Jeju citrus farms have switched from regular mandarins to mangam varieties — Hallabong, Cheonhyehyang, Redhyang. The prices are different. Ordinary mandarins run ₩9,500–11,000 per kg; Redhyang runs ₩10,000–13,000 per kg. It’s a strategy of stepping out of the ring with cheap imports and moving upmarket.

We’ve seen this strategy somewhere. It’s exactly the same solution as Jeju bananas coming back at ₩9,998 per kg — three times the import price.

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What Travelers Can See at a Korean Fruit Shop

This story isn’t in a museum. It’s on the supermarket shelf.

One more thing worth knowing when you look at prices. In Korea, the pricing logic for imported and domestic fruit is completely different. For reference, a crowdsourced cost-of-living site queried in September 2026 shows Seoul prices of about ₩4,630 per kg for bananas and ₩10,252 per kg for apples. It’s user-submitted data, not government statistics, and this article presents it only as a reference. But the direction is clear: fruit shipped across the ocean from the tropics is cheaper than fruit grown domestically.

One more thing. Most of the bananas eaten in Korea come from a single country. As of around 2012, 90% of the bananas Koreans ate came from the Philippines. This article couldn’t confirm recent shifts in the shares of Ecuador or Vietnam. Check the sticker at the store and you can see where they come from right now.

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So What’s the Takeaway?

The order of fruit on Korean shelves isn’t a result of taste. It’s a result of dates.

To summarize:

In April 1977, a 16-banana bunch was ₩5,500 and a bowl of jajangmyeon was ₩200. One bunch equaled 27.5 bowls. In 1989, Jeju harvested 20,000 tons of bananas from 443ha — the island’s top cash crop. In January 1991, imports were fully liberalized. By 1993, Jeju bananas were gone. Four years.

Then in 2012, bananas became the No. 1 fruit at one big-box chain with ₩26 billion in sales, beating domestic apples, pears, and mandarins. In 2018, of the 895,290 tons of fruit Korea imported, 427,260 tons — 44.9% — were bananas.

The descent from that peak was fast too. 2022 imports were 319,852 tons, down 25.1%. Per-capita fruit consumption itself fell from 59.8kg in 2015 to 51.5kg in 2020. Apples and pears weren’t pushed out by price — it was the knife. Fruit that needs no knife won, and now sweeter fruit is winning.

When you pick up a cheap bunch of bananas at a Korean fruit shop, January 1991 is inside that price. It was a win for consumers — and not for the 443ha. And that same calculation is unfolding again, right now, in front of a different fruit.