BEIJING – Mr Zhang Mingming, 35, will soon be harvesting some 1,000 durians from his orchard in Hainan island’s leafy Baoting county, a haven for tropical fruit.
They spell a windfall for the businessman-turned-farmer: His durians, of the Thai Ganyao variety, are priced at 200 yuan (S$37) per kilogram. If all goes well, Mr Zhang will be around 700,000 yuan richer by the end of the durian season in September.
The bounty will grow further when his Malaysian Musang King and Black Thorn trees start bearing fruit in the next year or two. These varieties can fetch higher premiums, he said, with some even selling for up to 2,000 yuan each.
Across southern China’s Hainan province, savvy farmers like Mr Zhang are driving a rise in home-grown durians, which are not native to the country.
It is a lucrative business opportunity – Chinese consumers love the fruit, eating some 1.4 million tonnes of fresh durian imports from South-east Asia in 2023, up more than 70 per cent year on year.
But while 2024 marks the second year that domestically produced durians are available on the market, from Monthongs to Musang Kings, very few Chinese will actually get to taste them, as their small yields and high prices render them largely inaccessible for now.
Fruit quality ‘unstable’
China planted its first durian tree in 1958, but for years, it barely bore fruit. It was only in 2018 that commercial durian farming began in earnest.
Most of this is taking place in tropical Hainan, and there are scattered pockets of growers in Guangxi region and Guangdong province in southern China, as well as in Yunnan province in south-western China.
The country’s first major durian harvest totalled 50 tonnes in 2023. And yields in 2024 are expected to reach 200 tonnes, said agriculture expert Feng Xuejie.
“The output is still very small because the trees have not been growing for long enough,” explained the director of the Institute of Tropical Fruit Trees at the Hainan Academy of Agricultural Sciences. “It takes six or seven years for the yields to start flourishing.”
That Hainan is prone to typhoons also does not help.
Mr Zhang said: “In May, I had over 3,000 durians growing. But after bouts of heavy rain, many dropped and there are now only 1,000 left.”
China’s nascent durian industry is still finding its footing.
Growers are working to step up not just production quantities, but also the fruit’s quality – which Mr Feng describes as “unstable”.
Source link : https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/east-asia/can-t-compete-with-s-e-asia-china-s-home-grown-durians-scarce-and-pricey-for-now
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Publish date : 2024-07-07 23:30:00
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