Hail damages new Chinese onion crop

Recently, the onion harvest and the air drying has already been completed in Shandong. Mister Liu from the Weifang prefecture says: “This year, due to cold weather in early spring, a part of the onion spouts were frozen to death, therefore the total output has shrunk to some extent. We forecast that the lost output is approximately 20%.”

Looking at it from a market perspective, at this moment the yellow onion price is approximately 0.65 RMB per kilo, and the red onion price is 0.3 – 0.4 RMB per kilo. There are two reasons for the difference in price. Firstly, last year the price for red onions from Weifang was very high, as a result, many vegetable farmers this year changed the seeds of the red onions, which lead to an increased amount of onions planted and a very large supply of red onions. Secondly, lots of areas in the Shandong province were hit by a hailstorm, causing damage to the part of the red onions that had not been harvested yet. To sum up, these two reasons disturbed the situation on the onion market, since there is a large amount of onions with poor quality, mister Liu explained.

By contrast, the yellow onions, which were planted in a relatively small area and were harvested early, escaped the hailstorm and have a pretty good quality. As a result, their price remains high at the moment, and the vegetable farmers claim not to be worried about the market. Since onions are similar to garlic and ginger, they have good storage conditions, which allow them to be stored for one year. Because last year the amount of onions in the whole of China was small, the price of the stored onions was very high, reaching more than 2 RMB per kilo.

According to mister Liu, the Weifang prefecture has onions planted in a big area, in addition to the entire domestic market, it also provides a lot of local processing plants that produce packaging for onion export. So, a large amount of onions will be exported to Japan and Korea.

For more information:

Mr Liu
Phone: +86 187 6570 1071