China’s $4 billion lychee harvest devastated by extreme weather

China’s $4 billion lychee harvest devastated by extreme weather

Extreme weather is devastating China’s crop of lychees, the jelly-like tropical fruit that’s worth $4 billion a year to the country’s farmers.

The nation is both the world’s largest producer and consumer of the fruit, and a significant exporter. About half of China’s lychees are grown in the southern province of Guangdong, where the harvest has fallen foul of an unusually warm winter followed by heavy spring rains. As a consequence, prices have jumped.

China produced 3.1 million tons last year, but this year’s harvest could be barely half that at 1.65 million to 1.75 million tons, said Chen Houbin, a professor at South China Agricultural University, who has studied the fruit for nearly three decades.

“People long for lychee season every year, and I have friends who eat more than 100 jin (50 kilograms) a year,” said Chen. “They won’t be able to consume that much this year given the higher cost.”

Guangdong saw a record amount of rain in April, with precipitation nearly three times the norm, according to the province’s weather bureau. But the lychee harvest is of course just a niche example of the wider havoc being wreaked on Chinese farming by climate change.

With the deluge set to continue in southern regions this week, the China Meteorological Center warned on Monday that low-lying fields are threatened by flooding that could disrupt the harvest of rapeseed, which is crushed for cooking oil, and the growth of the early rice crop.

And it’s not just farmland that’s affected. Prolonged heavy rains could slow the unloading of soybean imports and deliveries of soymeal for animal feed, as well as disrupt the movement of livestock and help spread disease, said Kang Wei Cheang, assistant vice president at StoneX Financial Pte Ltd.

China’s lychee-lovers, meanwhile, have taken to social media to complain about the surge in price of their favorite treat, prompting the authorities in Guangdong to release over 200 tons of fruit frozen from last year. At one point last week, lychees were the hottest topic on Weibo, the Twitter-like platform in China.

At a fruit shop in Beijing’s city center on Tuesday, lychees were fetching 45 yuan ($6.22) a kilogram, having jumped to as high as 80 yuan two weeks ago when the storms in Guangdong were at their worst. The fruit is usually less than 40 yuan a kilo at this time of the year, said store manager Shen Xianghe.

It won’t just be Chinese suffering from lychee-withdrawal. The country exported over 10,000 tons of the fruit in 2022, including to the US and Europe, with more than half of that from Guangdong. And then there are the farmers who bank on the crop every year.

Last month’s rain and hail storms blew a lot of unripe fruit off the trees, said Yin Yaocheng, who works at a lychee farm in the province. He expects profits to drop this year as China’s cash-strapped consumers won’t be able to afford significant price hikes. And he said he doesn’t know how to protect the crop from the extreme weather that’s striking with ever more regularity.

“Giant hailstones even punched holes in our warehouse’s roof,” he said. “How do you defend against that?”

The reported launch of 1 trillion yuan of Chinese special central government bonds is a step toward delivering on the 2024 budget, says Bloomberg Economics. China’s activity data for April will probably show the economy pulling out of a lull heading into the second quarter.

As President Joe Biden prepares a new wave of tariffs against China, a US soybean trade group is pushing for higher levies on Chinese used cooking oil that it says is undercutting American crops used for biofuels.

The European Union said Monday that it will close probes into bids by Chinese firms for a Romanian solar park because the companies are pulling out of the tender.

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