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In the past 10 years, China has been Taiwan's most important fresh fruit export market, with annual procurement amounts ranging from NT$1 billion to NT$4 billion. The largest items are pineapples, custard apples, and custard apples. In 2021, China suddenly banned the import of these three fruits from Taiwan on the grounds of detection of pests, severely hitting Taiwan's fruit farmers.
In February 2021, China announced that it would suspend the import of Taiwanese pineapples, and the ban caused waves in Taiwan. The container ship that had already set off and was filled with golden pineapples had to turn back at sea. Tens of thousands of tons of pineapples packed for export also suddenly lost their destination. Guanmiao pineapple farmer Huang Qifan’s first thought at the moment was: What a tragedy! Huang Qifan is a second-generation pineapple farmer and the president of the Guanmiao branch of the Tainan Youth Farmers Association. Before China issued the ban, he could produce about 600 metric tons of pineapples a year, most of which were exported to mainland China. He originally thought that he would suffer heavy losses, face slow sales or price collapse. Looking back now, this year was considered a near miss. Under the strong call of the government, traders and domestic enterprises have subscribed one after another. The Committee of Agriculture also subsidizes local governments and agricultural and fishery associations to assist in procurement promotions. It also requires that the price should not be lower than the average origin price of the previous two years to ensure farmers' income and avoid price cuts. compete.
China announced that it would suspend the import of Taiwanese fresh pineapples from March 1, 2021. However, data shows that sporadic pineapples were still shipped into China in March, about 720 metric tons, worth about 25.71 million yuan. In the same month, a large number of pineapples were resold to Japan and Hong Kong, with each importing about 1,700 metric tons of Taiwanese pineapples.
Taiwan’s export distribution
In February this year, mainland China banned the import of Taiwanese pineapples, citing quarantine issues. In the past, Taiwanese pineapples have sometimes been unsaleable due to bad weather that disrupted the harvest period and caused quality problems. As Taiwan's largest export market for pineapples, imports from mainland China usually account for 90% of Taiwan's total exports. If the mainland market is lost, many people believe it will squeeze the already saturated local market, causing pineapple prices to plummet and affecting farmers' incomes.
Official data released by Taiwan shows that Taiwanese pineapples did not suffer a fatal blow after losing the mainland market this year, because imports from Japan and Hong Kong, the second and third largest export destinations for Taiwanese pineapples, increased several times.
"The crisis has turned into an opportunity," said Jiao Jun, CEO of Taiwan's Shuili Strategic Consulting Company, which has been involved in agricultural production and marketing planning for many years. "You can see a new market replacing what could have been a stable market, and that's a positive change."
Taiwan’s export output
Lin Zhihong analyzed that the internationally mainstream pineapple variety MD2 has a lower storage and transportation temperature, about 7 to 8 degrees Celsius. However, Taiwanese pineapple varieties are different and less cold-tolerant, and the optimal storage temperature is about 13 degrees. At that time, traders directly exported Taiwanese pineapples using the MD2 storage and transportation model, which resulted in the pineapples being frostbitten and turning into "black-hearted" pineapples.
Lin Zhihong, deputy director of the International Department of the Council of Agriculture, said that the Council of Agriculture initially set the export target to Japan at 5,000 metric tons. Later, it was found that the results were much better than expected, so the target was raised to 10,000 metric tons; as a result, Japan had a full year Actually, 18,000 metric tons were imported, which provided a timely opportunity for Taiwanese pineapples to be resold. Singapore also warmly welcomes Taiwanese pineapples. Jiao Jun, the author of "Fruit Politics" who has long observed cross-strait agricultural trade issues, analyzed that traders have been operating the Singapore market since 2019, and they have also delivered outstanding results in the past two years. However, after China's ban was issued in 2021, some new traders exported without doing enough cold chain homework in order to rush, resulting in the black-hearted pineapple incident, which once caused a public relations crisis.
"The black-hearted pineapple incident happened in March last year, and we told the industry in April that we would not sell to Singapore this year." Lin Zhihong said that the most important thing is to save the overseas reputation of Taiwanese pineapples. Chairman of the Committee of Agriculture Chen Jizhong also went to the front line to apologize and stressed that if exporters failed to export in accordance with regulations, subsidies would not be issued.
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