Last year in June the Indian government introduced a ban on Chinese apples and pears. This ban was executed because the Indian National Plant Protection Organisation (NPPO) detected mealy bugs and fungus on several shipments of Chinese apples and pears.
Freshplaza spoke to the manager of Alfa Fruit Packers Limited Hong Kong this week about the current situation. “For now, the ban on the export of Chinese apples to India is still there. It is also not clear when the Indian government will lift this ban, though we hope the ban will be lifted very soon. It quite affected our market, because we used to export a lot apples to India, so now we need to sell them to other countries. So it is a quite worrying situation for the apple exporters in China, because India is a large market for China.”
Furthermore, the Indian apple market is now under even greater pressure, because India and America have started a trade war. Since this week, the Indian government announced it is going to impose additional duty fees on the import of apples from America. “This is the current situation. This new announcement further upsets the Indian apple market.” There is not a large production of apples in India itself. Therefore, to meet its demand, India is dependent on its apple import for sufficient apple supply. How further events will occur is not sure, time will tell.
Alfa Fruit Packers is a daughter company of Alfa Far East Trading, a Hong Kong based company that has been in the produce business for over 30 years. It specializes in cold storage and operates a pack house. The company mainly exports to Southeast Asian countries, furthermore, the company is one of the five companies that hold apple export licenses to Australia.
