China Opens to Pears

China Opens to Pears. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Fruit Grower Report.

China has finally opened their doors to all varieties of U.S. pears. Kevin Moffitt with Pear Bureau NW says there were a couple of issues that had kept China from accepting the trade.

MOFFITT: The biggest one was fire blight. China claims they don’t have fire blight so we had to jump through a lot of hoops. We had some studies conducted that showed that fire blight isn’t carried on fruit itself. So if you are not shipping the trees and the nursery stock fire blight shouldn’t be an issue when we’re just shipping pears. And they’re also concerned with some things like codling moth.

The Chinese government is going to require some additional trapping of codling moth to be done in orchards.

MOFFITT: They have some real concerns about some of the rots and things like bullseye rot. So it’s not going to be just a wide open door but we believe that it’s a pretty good negotiation and pretty good manageable requirements for us to ship pears into China.

China will also be allowed to ship a third pear variety into the U.S. Moffitt says this will be very good for northwest pear producers.

MOFFITT: Let me put it into perspective. We’ve been able to ship into Hong Kong for a number of years. There’s never been an issue with Hong Kong. Right now Hong Kong is our eighth largest market and we’re shipping about 130-thousand boxes. Well we think that the China market could easily be a couple hundred thousand in the first year and ramp up to maybe 300-thousand in the first few years.

And that translates to around $6-million dollars.

That’s today’s Fruit Grower Report. I’m Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network.