The Agricultural Information Research Institute of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences predicts that the direct consumption of fruit in China will reach 123 million tons in 2019 and 127 million tons in 2020. As a staple fruit, the consumption of apples is also expected to increase greatly, but the price was not cheap in the first 6 months of this year. Now that the new crop is becoming available soon, how will prices develop in the new season?
In the first 6 months of this year, apple prices rose sharply. Especially in May, the wholesale price of half a kilo in the Xinfadi Market in Beijing reached about 6 yuan. In many fruit stores across China, the retail price of big-sized, good-quality apples even reached over 10 yuan. Some analysts believe that there are two main reasons for this rise in apple prices.
Most of the apples were harvested in the autumn, so apples sold in the first half of the year were mainly last year’s harvest from cold storage, so the price was naturally higher than that in the second half of the year. Moreover, many of the main production areas were affected by a spell of cold weather in the spring of 2018, leading to lower production and higher costs for fruit in cold storage. In addition, the price of some seasonal fruit this summer was not cheap either, for a variety of reasons, so there were no large price differences among the various fruits.
Source: cnr.cn