China’s home-grown durians are expected to hit the market this month. Still, it could be years before the vast majority of consumers can get their hands on it, and estimates for projected yields have fallen sharply in recent months.
After more than four years of cultivation, Hainan farmers are gearing up for the nation’s first large-scale domestic durian harvest. They are keen to cash in on the growing domestic demand for what has quickly become China’s most popular imported fruit.
But Feng Xuejie, director of the Institute of Tropical Fruit Trees at the Hainan Academy of Agricultural Sciences and a researcher at the Hainan Academy of Agricultural Sciences, expects that Hainan will only produce around 50 tons of durians this year. That would account for only about 0.005 per cent of all the durian eaten in China this year. That new projected yield is much less than the 2,450-ton figure reported in March.
Source: scmp.com