PANAMA
CITY
“These women are worth their weight in gold,” says Mick Bartlett, pointing to his Chinese staff hard at work among a sea of carnation stems. “They all have green fingers because they are farmers. They know about plants.” Seasoned, low-cost labour is not the only thing attracting people like Mr Bartlett, the Australian manager for Finlays’ China
operations, to set up in this part of China.
Companies including Anthura, Windmill and Van den Berg Roses say there is an unbeatable combination of clean fresh water, intense light, mild climate and good infrastructure.
This is turning Kunming, laid-back capital of the south-western Yunnan province, into the location of choice for international growers looking east to markets like Japan. But their investments in the region are also set to change the image of Chinese grown flowers globally, raising standards among local growers and helping them achieve their long-term goal of competing with leading suppliers like Kenya or Columbia.
“China’s reputation for flowers in the rest of the world is rubbish. But we’re aiming to grow Columbian-quality flowers that will be fit for the Japanese,” says Mr Bartlett.
For the leading horticulture firm, the draw of Japan is too strong to ignore. Japanese consumers are the world’s biggest spenders on flowers, paying high prices for top quality. The UK grower has invested US$2.4 million in its new farm north of Kunming and is about to harvest its first crop of mostly spray-head carnations destined for Japan.
China’s rich neighbour is just an eight-hour plane journey away, half the time of a flight from Columbia, currently Japan’s biggest supplier of high-end flowers. The China-grown flowers should cost a third of Columbia’s price, says Mr Bartlett.
Sales are still dependent on convincing discerning Japanese buyers of Chinese quality however. China has earned a reputation as a new, but rather low quality, player in global floriculture markets.
“We’re definitely under scrutiny because we’re Chinese grown. Our products will have to be labelled with the Finlays brand but not from China. Otherwise we would immediately be discounted,” says Mr Bartlett.
In just 10 years, Chinese flowers have made huge improvements in quality, say the experts, but post-harvest handling remains the country’s major weak point.
Gidi Dekker, general manager of AGB Flower Lily, a Dutch-Taiwanese trading company based in Kunming, says that while demand for Yunnan flowers is rapidly growing, it is still difficult to source a stable, quality supply from the region’s estimated 80,000 small, household growers. And while Yunnan province alone has become one of the world’s largest carnation producers, producing around 200 million stems, most growers do not yet work to market or seasonal demand.
“There is no information flow so they don’t know what they’re producing for. They just come to the market and sell.”
Once the product reaches the market, its handling further damages export potential. A visit to the Dounan flower market, just outside Kunming city, is a good insight into where the system breaks down. Rushing to meet demand during peak holiday season in Vietnam, packers squeeze 4,000 carnation stems into large cardboard boxes, using metal clamps to close the bursting containers and save on transport costs.
Flowers for export markets further away get slightly better treatment but not enough to radically change international expectations of shelflife from Chinese grown flowers.
When packed by international firms using the highest standards, flowers are still threatened with poorer shelflife because of local regulations stipulating that all exports to Japan are fumigated. The rule has the international growers up in arms.
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