As Jiangxi Floods Social Media with Navel Oranges, What Are Local Farmers Really Facing?
I. The fruit buyers didn’t come this year
“Back in the day, the pickers never had time to sit down for lunch,” Auntie Zou recalled. “To keep the harvest moving, we’d carry the food up the mountain, and everyone would just squat by the roadside to eat.”
This year, with the oranges barely moving, the energy to work had drained away.
Liao Hai was the only young face at the table. A few years prior, he had returned home to manage the orchard full-time. I was introduced to the family by his elder sister, Fengche, who works in Guangzhou. It was through her that I first heard of the dire market conditions for navel oranges, prompting me to travel to the source region to investigate.
The slump in the Gannan navel orange market in 2023 was unprecedented.
Each year in mid-to-late November, as the oranges began to ripen, the roads would fill with lorries from buyers arriving from all over the country to collect their cargo. Out-of-town buyers would come to inspect the fruit, while local intermediaries would make the introductions to the farmers. The Liao family rarely needed to go out in search of buyers; they could simply wait at home, confident that middlemen and purchasers would naturally make their way to their door. Yet as 2023 drew to a close, the road outside their house lay deserted, and not a single buyer was put in touch with the family.
“When the market is brisk, buyers will come to inspect the crop and book orchards as early as July or August. Even in lean years, someone still drops by to take a look. But I’ve never seen it like this year – not a single buyer came through,” Auntie Zou said. It was the first time in more than two decades of growing navel oranges that she had faced conditions this grim.
Compounding the issue, market prices kept plummeting. Liao Hai shared the updates he had pieced together from fellow growers: “Initially, orchards were being pre-booked at 2.7 yuan per jin. That dropped to 2.2 yuan, then 1.8, and finally down to 1.2.” Online reports suggested that purchase prices in the Gannan region had already slipped below 1 yuan per jin.
What drove the relentless decline in navel orange prices?
II. A Bleak and Sluggish Market
The fruit merchants here broadly agree thatweak consumer spending has led to a slump in sales across all fruit.
Wholesaler Mr Tong told me: “It’s not just the navel oranges that are hard to shift; every type of fruit is slow to sell. Just look at us—with no trade, we’ve taken to playing cards.”
Mr Tong also runs an account on Douyin, occasionally filming clips to hawk his stock. Though he rarely attracts buyers, he feels he must keep putting the videos out.
With sales lagging, market prices for navel oranges have fallen sharply compared with 2022. Taking medium-sized oranges with a diameter of around 80mm as an example, prices range from 2.4 to 4 yuan depending on origin and quality. Another wholesaler, Boss Huang, told me that prices in 2022 were far higher than in 2023: “At first they were around 3 or 4 yuan, then they even climbed to 5 or 7 yuan. At one point, you couldn’t find stock anywhere in the market.”
“But that surge was largely thanks to Zhong Nanshan,” he said. “He recommended eating more oranges to boost vitamin C to help ward off coronavirus, which drove prices up that much. The most outrageous part was lemons, which shot up to 8 or 9 yuan a jin—you’d never have thought lemons would get to be the big shot for once.”
Boss Huang secured his orders early, but the farmgate price alone exceeded 2 yuan. Add in another 0.5 to 0.6 yuan for picking, transport, and sorting, and the costs quickly add up. When he brings them to market, medium-sized oranges only fetch around 3 yuan, making it impossible to turn a profit.
Youshui Township in Haichang County is home to a large concentration of fruit buyers purchasing navel oranges. Flanking National Highway 206 in the township are dozens of factories and warehouses dedicated to sorting and processing the fruit. This is the first stop for oranges sourced from the surrounding area; from here, they are dispatched across the country via wholesalers, supermarkets, and online platforms.
“Sales this year will drop by more than 50 per cent,” Mr Xiao, a fruit buyer, told me. He owns a small factory complete with a full production line for preservative dips, sorting, and packing, as well as machinery for printing cartons. The workshop is stacked with sorted oranges of various sizes, piled crate upon crate in the store room. Mr Xiao explained that his oranges are supplied not only to wholesalers but also sold on online platforms such as Pinduoduo. Mr Liu, another buyer who specialises in supplying supermarkets, confirmed that although sales through that channel are holding up, the broader market is undeniably shrinking and prices are falling.
III. A Disappointing Bumper Harvest
According to the Ganzhou Municipal Agriculture Bureau, Gannan navel orange output stood at 1.38 million tonnes in 2020, 1.5 million tonnes in 2021, and 1.59 million tonnes in 2022, maintaining a steady growth trajectory each year. Yet locals in Huichang told me that yields fluctuate considerably and the official statistics are inaccurate; it is more reliable to survey growers directly.
Growers widely regard 2022 as a disaster year: a severe summer drought stunted fruit development, and rain just before harvest caused excessive internal moisture, resulting in cracked skins and a sharp decline in yield. This was not confined to Huichang County; the same situation unfolded across the wider Ganzhou region.
By contrast, 2023 was undoubtedly a year of favourable weather and abundant harvests. “But we don’t call it a bumper harvest,” said Secretary Zou, the village party secretary. “We just say production is normal.”
Extrapolating from the yields of the few growers I interviewed, 2023 output was nearly double that of 2022. Liao Hai’s orchard produced just over five tonnes (10,000 jin) in 2022, but in 2023 it yielded at least ten tonnes. Another grower, Lao Cheng, harvested just over 15 tonnes in 2022; in 2023 he anticipated around 25 tonnes, only to see the final harvest reach 37.5 tonnes.
Unexpectedly, this bumper harvest has led to the familiar plight of cheap fruit hurting growers: compared to the peak of around 2.7 yuan in early November, acquisition prices in December have plummeted to just 1.2 yuan. At this rate, even a heavier crop fails to offset the price collapse, leaving farmers with reduced income.
IV. A Biting Cold Wave Adds to the Hardship
At the beginning of December, growers were alerted to a worrying forecast: temperatures across the country were set to plummet in mid-December, with the navel orange-growing areas around Ganzhou facing the rare prospect of sub-zero conditions. If the fruit were still hanging on the branches when the frost hit, it would be all too easy for them to freeze and lose their flavour. The only way to safeguard the harvest was to pick and store the oranges before the cold front arrived. This explains why Liao Hai’s household decided to bring the crop down by the 13th, regardless of whether they had found a buyer.
Liao Hai said he had been checking the forecast every day for over a week. “The predicted temperatures keep fluctuating. One day they’re below freezing, the next they won’t dip below zero.” Because dropping below zero can severely impact the quality of the fruit, growers have been constantly swapping information with one another. Some have even taken on the role of amateur meteorologists—I overheard one farmer explaining that he’d just studied the satellite cloud cover and concluded the cold air mass had shifted course and would miss Ganzhou altogether.
Yet for all the close monitoring of forecasts and the scouring of every possible update, hoping the cold snap would spare them was largely wishful thinking. Most growers in the area have decided to race against time to harvest the fruit. For those without the means to store their crop, the only practical solution is to find a buyer willing to take the oranges before the temperatures drop. In years past, the picking season for navel oranges would stretch from early November right up to the Lunar New Year; this year, the entire crop needs to be off the branches well before mid-December.
Dozens of warehouses, large and small, lining the roadsides of Youshui township are packed to the brim with navel oranges. Buyers are sitting on hundreds of thousands of kilograms of unsold fruit, with storage capacity nearing its limit. To make room for the crop, one local warehouse actually sold off over 150,000 kilograms of its stockpiled tung cake—a traditional fertiliser—at cost price.
“We’re short of everything right now: no space, no labour, no trucks, no plastic crates.” Mr Liu, a local buyer, says he is under immense pressure himself; he wants to purchase more fruit, but simply cannot take it on. After all, without a clear route to market, he would be left bearing the entire risk of the surplus.
“The price for navel oranges was actually quite decent at first, but then the weather forecast warned of an incoming cold snap, and the prices dropped sharply,” Liao Hai told me.
At the end of November, the buying price for navel oranges was still above 2 yuan per jin. By 12 December, however, it had fallen to around 1.1–1.2 yuan, with some middlemen even offering 0.9 yuan on the day.
Liao Hai’s mother, Aunt Zou, spoke bluntly: “Even when the market was good in 2022, no buyers were willing to raise their offers; the purchase price was still just over 2 yuan. When times are bad, they just try to drive down the prices paid to farmers.”
According to estimates from various local growers, even excluding labour costs, the direct cash expenses for fertiliser and pesticides amount to 1–1.5 yuan per jin of navel oranges, depending on factors such as tree age and fertiliser application rates. At current buying prices, most growers say they “cannot even break even.”
V. The Tug-of-War Between Growers, Buyers, and the Market
Grower Lao Cheng pre-sold his orchard at that time, locking in a price of 2.63 yuan per jin. The original harvest date was set for 15 November, but due to heavy rains and suboptimal sugar levels, the buyers pushed the picking date back to the 23rd. Lao Cheng said he sensed they were deliberately stalling; the later the harvest, the lower the market price, giving buyers greater leverage to negotiate.
On the day of the harvest, however, the buyers changed their tune again. They agreed to purchase only the first 36,000 jin harvested at the contracted rate of 2.63 yuan, offering just 2.05 yuan for the rest. Lao Cheng stood his ground and refused the cut. In response, the buyers stated they would only collect the 50,000 jin specified in the contract, leaving Lao Cheng to sort out the remainder himself.
With buying prices shifting daily, even a single day’s delay works against the growers. Secretary Zou told me that on the day of harvesting, he had agreed with a fruit buyer on a price of 2.2 yuan for his 60,000 jin of navel oranges. Yet by the afternoon, the buyer reneged, lowering the offer to 2.17 yuan. Zou had no choice but to sell quickly.
Another local grower faced a different predicament: “The collectors are picking and tossing at the same time. They reject anything too green or too large, and in the end, they’re throwing away a third of the crop.” The discarded substandard fruit can only be sold for 0.6 yuan.
One thing is certain, however: the oranges secured early on at higher prices will also cause headaches for the buyers. At current market rates, selling this batch of pre-ordered fruit will almost certainly result in a loss.
Faced with severe oversupply, buyers have even less incentive to honour their original contracts and continue purchasing. Consequently, they are left with essentially two strategies: negotiate a price cut with the growers, or forfeit their deposits and breach the contracts.
“A cut of 0.1 or 0.2 yuan doesn’t help us, but if we cut it too deeply, the growers won’t accept it. So we might as well just write off the deposit,” said Boss Liu from Youxiong Township. Of the navel oranges he had pre-ordered at 2.8 yuan earlier, he has already backed out of about half.
Locally, the deposit for a jin of oranges is roughly 0.5 yuan. Once the gap between the market buying price and the pre-agreed price widens too much, contract breaches become virtually inevitable. Growers wait it out, only to find their contracts cancelled by buyers. In some cases, a grower will first sell an orchard at 2.7 yuan, get stood up, then re-list it at 1.8 yuan, only to be stood up again. Locals joke that it’s like getting married, divorced, and remarried, except nowadays you can’t even keep a second marriage afloat.
At this point, growers like Lao Cheng, who secured orders and harvested early, are already counting themselves very lucky. He even remarked: “Last year, I also locked in orders early, only for prices to rise later. Who knew that booking early this year would end up being the most expensive option?” He told us of a fellow villager who cultivates 100,000 jin of oranges. He could have sold his crop at 2.6 yuan but gambled that prices would climb later. He held out, only to be forced into selling at a knockdown price just as frost approached.
VI. Recovering from the Frost
What are these farmers with unsold fruit supposed to do? It was a question I found myself asking again and again during the interviews.
Most growers are still waiting it out. Those with the means are storing the harvest themselves, banking on prices to rise after the frost before they sell. With fruit traders no longer stepping in to buy and store the crop, farmers have been left to fend for themselves. Most have adopted a strategy similar to the Liao Hai family: enlisting relatives and friends to help with the picking, securing warehouse space, and then individually bagging the fruit or spraying it with preservatives to keep it fresh for longer. Although costly and labour-intensive, these challenges remain manageable for those with a relatively modest yield.
“After all, selling the fruit now means taking a loss anyway, so why not take a gamble?” This is the prevailing mindset among growers.
The real question is whether prices will actually recover once the frost has passed.
Optimists argue that the current sell-off is merely a short-term panic triggered by the cold snap, and that the market will eventually return to normal. Furthermore, with some oranges frozen on the trees, the reduced supply should naturally push prices back up. Pessimists, however, contend that overall navel orange production is simply too vast. A frost cannot shift the underlying fundamentals of supply and demand or consumer habits. Whether in the hands of growers or merchants, the sheer volume of fruit means it will remain difficult to move. Once competing varieties such as Shatang mandarins and Wogan mandarins hit the market, navel oranges will stand even less chance.
Whichever prediction proves correct, one fact is indisputable: beyond Ganzhou, the citrus market across the country is fiercely competitive. On Douyin, beneath a short video featuring a Ganzhou grower playing up his misfortunes, the comments section was filled not just with farmers comparing hardships, but crowned by the top-liked remark: “Hang on a bit longer, and the Shatang mandarins, Huangdi mandarins and Wogan mandarins from Guangxi will put you in your place.”
The online regional rivalries are grounded in economic reality. In Ganzhou, most growers believe that cheaper oranges from other provinces are intensifying local competition. One grower told me that a merchant had brought a batch of oranges from Hunan, selling them for just 1.3 yuan upon arrival in Ganzhou—a price that would only result in losses for local growers. The farmers also argue that these imported oranges are of inferior quality, which is precisely why they are so cheap. Liao Hai’s uncle by marriage recounted to me that he had tried navel oranges from outside the region; upon peeling them, he found they lacked the fresh, distinctive aroma characteristic of Gannan navel oranges.
Notably, during the 2023 harvest season, governments at various levels in Ganzhou significantly tightened controls over non-local navel oranges. They not only issued directives instructing merchants not to purchase fruit from outside the region, but even set up checkpoints on motorways to stop vehicles. Any merchant found with out-of-area oranges faced fines. To locals, this was not merely about protecting the geographical indication of “Gannan Navel Orange”, but also a governmental response to a sluggish market.
Secretary Zou also noted that the Huichang County government is currently tallying the unsold navel orange production in the area, and may introduce supportive sales measures in the future. Yet, given the nationwide oversupply of navel oranges—and citrus fruits as a whole—it remains unclear whether these broader efforts will provide any immediate relief.
Meanwhile, growers have long begun to take matters into their own hands: selling oranges via short videos and online shops, or leveraging family and friend networks. This is precisely why the internet has been abuzz with the saying, “Everyone in Jiangxi on WeChat Moments is selling oranges.”
Fengche, Liao Hai’s sister who works in Guangzhou, not only set up her own WeChat group to help market the family’s crop, but also contacted fruit shops in Guangzhou to place orders for several hundred jin of navel oranges. Other growers have confided that their nephews’ companies might be able to purchase a batch of fruit. Through such channels, they can typically maintain a retail price of over 4 yuan per jin. After deducting shipping costs, growers can still net more than 3 yuan per jin. Even with lower sales volumes, this approach proves more economically viable than accepting the rock-bottom wholesale prices offered by merchants.
When the ‘Southern Jiangxi Navel Orange’ brand was first established, China’s domestic fruit market was nowhere near as fiercely competitive, and navel oranges could still command premium prices. Even five or six years ago, local migrant workers in Huichang spearheaded a wave of returning home to invest in orange groves. In their middle age, they hoped that liquidating their migrant work savings to plant a mountain of navel oranges would secure their retirement. Yet over recent years, and particularly given this year’s sluggish navel orange market, these new growers have long since lost hope in the crop.
VII. The Recurring Crisis of Collapsing Prices Hurting Growers
Yet whether transitioning to new varieties or upgrading quality, both require government backing, established sales channels, and, needless to say, substantial investment.Even well-capitalised enterprises with market intelligence face enormous risks attempting to shift the industry, let alone ordinary growers.
When growers lacking market information, capital, and social networks are hit by market volatility, the tragic cycle of collapsing prices devastating farmers is inevitably repeated.
Perhaps the most bluntly honest remark comes from a grower himself: “With so many people catching colds lately, why not have Professor Zhong Nanshan make a public statement? My oranges might just sell then!”
Indeed, when it comes to turning around a depressed market, growers cannot rely on anyone. If a single remark from an expert is the only thing left to hope for, what prospects do farmers really have?
Editor: Tianle