When Every Jiangxi Person on WeChat Moments Is Selling Navel Oranges — What Are the Farmers in the Growing Regions Actually Going Through?
I. The Fruit Buyers Never Came This Year
Aunt Zou said, “Before, the pickers never even had time for lunch. To race through the harvest, we would send meals up the mountain, and everyone would just squat by the roadside to eat.”
This year, the oranges weren’t selling, and there was no energy left in the work.
Among those gathered at the table, Liao Hai was the only young face. A few years ago, he had returned home to tend the orchard full-time. I had come to know the family through his elder sister Fengche, who works in Guangzhou, and it was through her that I learned of the dire market for navel oranges and decided to come to the source region to see for myself.
The 2023 market for Gannan navel oranges had been worse than anything seen before.
Every year in mid-to-late November, the navel oranges begin to ripen, and the roads fill with lorries belonging to fruit merchants from all over, coming to load up. Buyers from elsewhere would come to inspect the fruit, while local middlemen would introduce them to fruit farmers. The Liao family never used to have to go out looking for buyers — middlemen and merchants would come knocking on their own. But with 2023 nearly over, the road outside was deserted, and no one was bringing a buyer to the Liao family’s door.
“If the market is good, buyers come to inspect the fruit as early as July and August and book the orchards. Even when prices are poor, someone still comes to look, but it has never been like this year — not a single buyer in sight,” Aunt Zou said. In more than twenty years of growing navel oranges, this was the first time she had encountered a situation this bad.
Meanwhile, market prices for navel oranges kept falling. Liao Hai told me what he had learned, piece by piece, from other fruit farmers: “The first bookings for orchards were at two yuan seventy per jin, then it dropped to two twenty, then to one eighty, and then down to one twenty.” Online reports indicated that purchase prices in Gannan had already fallen below one yuan.
Why had navel orange prices continued to fall?
II. A Sluggish, Deserted Market
The merchants here were broadly of one view: weak consumer demand had brought down sales across every kind of fruit.
Wholesaler Mr Tong told me, “It’s not just navel oranges that aren’t selling — no fruit is. Look at us: with no customers, we’ve even taken up playing cards.”
Mr Tong also runs an account on Douyin and occasionally films videos to sell produce. In truth, his customers are few, but he feels he must keep pushing on and filming.
With sales sluggish, navel orange prices at market were well below those of 2022. Taking medium-grade fruit of around 80 mm in diameter as a reference point, prices ranged from 2.4 to 4 yuan depending on origin and quality. Another wholesaler, Mr Huang, told me that 2022 prices had been far higher than those in 2023: “They started at three or four yuan, then climbed to five, even seven — you couldn’t find stock anywhere in the market.”
“But back then we were riding on the coattails of Zhong Nanshan, who said eating more oranges to boost vitamin C could help prevent the coronavirus — that’s what pushed prices up so much. The wildest one was lemons: they shot up to eight or nine yuan a jin — even the lemon never imagined it could have a turn as the big shot.”
Mr Huang’s oranges had been booked early, so the farm-gate purchase price exceeded two yuan. Add five or six mao a jin for picking, transport and sorting, and by the time the medium-grade fruit reached the market it fetched only about three yuan. There was simply no way to make a profit.
Youshui Township in Huichang County is home to a large concentration of navel orange buyers. Along both sides of National Highway 206, dozens of factories and warehouses handle the sorting and processing of oranges. This is the first stop for navel oranges purchased in the surrounding area; from here they are dispatched to all corners of the country via wholesalers, supermarkets and online platforms.
“Sales this year will fall by more than fifty per cent,” buyer Mr Xiao told me. He owns a small factory with a complete production line — preservative dipping, sorting and packaging — as well as equipment for printing branded orange cartons. The warehouse floor was stacked with crates of sorted oranges in every grade. Mr Xiao said his navel oranges went not only to wholesale buyers but were also sold on platforms such as Pinduoduo. Another buyer, Mr Liu, who supplies supermarkets exclusively, reported that while supermarket sales remained steady, overall market volume and prices had undeniably shrunk.
III. A Disheartening Harvest
According to the Ganzhou Municipal Bureau of Agriculture, 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 — steady year-on-year growth. But locals in Huichang told me that orange yields fluctuated widely and the official statistics were unreliable; it was better to ask the fruit farmers directly.
Farmers were unanimous in calling 2022 a disaster year: a severe summer drought stunted the oranges, and rains just before harvest left the fruit swollen with water, splitting the skins and slashing yields by a wide margin. The damage was not confined to Huichang County — the same story played out across the rest of Ganzhou.
By contrast, 2023 had undeniably been blessed with timely rain and favourable weather. “But we don’t call it a bumper crop,” said Village Party Secretary Zou. “We just say the yield is normal.”
Estimating from the harvests reported by several farmers I interviewed, output in 2023 had nearly doubled compared with 2022. Liao Hai’s orchard had produced just over ten thousand jin in 2022; in 2023 the yield was at least twenty thousand. Another farmer, Old Cheng, had harvested only about thirty thousand jin from his orchard in 2022; he estimated the 2023 harvest could reach fifty thousand jin — but the final tally came in at seventy-five thousand jin.
In the end, the bumper crop brought nothing but the familiar curse of fruit prices too low for farmers to profit: compared with the early-November high of around 2.7 yuan, the December purchase price had fallen to just 1.2 yuan. At that rate, even the increased output could not offset the price collapse, and farmers’ incomes would still shrink.
IV. A Cold Snap on Top of the Misery
In early December, the farmers all spotted the same forecast: the whole country would be hit by a sharp plunge in temperatures around mid-December, and in Ganzhou’s navel orange growing areas the mercury would drop below freezing for the first time in living memory. If the oranges were still on the trees when frost arrived, they would freeze easily and turn off-flavoured. Only by getting in and stored ahead of the cold snap could the fruit be kept at all. That is why, even with no sales channel in place, Liao Hai’s family had no choice but to start picking on the 13th.
Liao Hai said that for more than a week he had been checking the weather forecast every day. ‘The predicted temperatures kept swinging about — one minute it says below zero, the next it says it won’t go below.’ Whether the temperature dropped below zero or not made a huge difference to fruit quality, so the farmers were constantly passing information to one another. Some even became makeshift meteorologists — I heard one farmer say he had just looked at the satellite cloud images and concluded that the cold mass had changed direction and would not reach Ganzhou.
Despite farmers poring over the forecasts day and night and chasing every rumour in hopes the cold would miss them, it was mostly wishful thinking. Most of the local farmers chose to race against the clock and strip the trees before the cold arrived. For the majority who could not find storage facilities of their own, the best option was to find a middleman willing to buy before the frost. The navel orange harvest used to run from early November all the way to around the Spring Festival; this year, every last orange had to be off the trees by mid-December.
Along the roads of Youshui Township, the dozens of warehouses, large and small, were crammed wall to wall with oranges. Buyers across the board already had several million jin of navel oranges sitting unsold, and storage capacity was fast approaching its ceiling. One local warehouse even sold off over 300,000 jin of tung oil press cake — normally kept as organic fertiliser — at cost price, just to clear space for the fruit.
‘Right now there is nowhere to put them, no workers, no lorries, no plastic crates — we are short of everything,’ said buyer Mr Liu, who felt the squeeze himself: he wanted to buy but could not take any more in. And without a sales outlet, he would still be left carrying the risk of stockpiled fruit.
‘The navel orange prices were actually holding up all right, and then the forecast said a cold snap was coming, and they just plummeted,’ Liao Hai told me.
At the end of November, the purchase price for navel oranges was still above 2 yuan per jin. By 12 December, it had dropped to around 1.1 to 1.2 yuan, and on that day one middleman even offered 0.9 yuan.
Liao Hai’s mother, Aunt Zou, was blunt: ‘Even in 2022, when the market was good, not a single buyer was willing to raise their price — it was still just over two yuan. When the market is bad, all they do is push the farmers’ prices down.’
By the local farmers’ own calculations, even setting aside labour costs, the cash cost of fertiliser, pesticide and other inputs for a single jin of navel oranges ran between 1 and 1.5 yuan, depending on the age of the trees and how much fertiliser was applied. At the current purchase prices, most farmers say flatly, ‘I can’t even break even.’
V. The Tug-of-War Between Farmers, Buyers and the Market
Old Cheng booked his orchard at that time, at 2.63 yuan per jin. The original harvest date was set for 15 November, but because of the heavy rain the Brix levels came in low, so the buyer pushed the picking back to the 23rd. Old Cheng says he sensed the buyer was stalling from the start — the later the harvest, the lower the market price, and the stronger the buyer’s hand in haggling.
On the actual picking day, the buyer changed tack again, agreeing to pay the contract price of 2.63 yuan only for the thirty-six thousand jin harvested on the first day, and just 2.05 yuan for the rest. Old Cheng stood firm and refused to accept the cut. The buyer, in turn, insisted on picking only the fifty thousand jin specified in the contract and told Old Cheng to find his own buyers for the remainder.
With the purchase price shifting daily, every extra day of delay worked against the farmer. Secretary Zou told me that on the day he had his sixty thousand jin picked, he agreed a price of 2.2 yuan with the fruit trader that morning, but by the afternoon the buyer had changed his mind to 2.17 yuan. All he could do was sell quickly.
Another farmer in the same township faced a different ordeal: ‘The pickers were throwing fruit out as they went — anything a little green, they wouldn’t take; anything a little large, they wouldn’t take either. In the end they discarded a third of the harvest.’ Those rejects could only fetch 0.6 yuan.
What is certain, though, is that even the oranges already bought at higher prices are now a headache for the merchants. At current market rates, selling this batch of pre-booked fruit is almost guaranteed to mean a loss.
With stock piling up, buyers have even less appetite to honour their original prices or keep taking fruit in. In practice they are left with two options: negotiate a price cut with the farmer, or walk away from the contract and forfeit the deposit.
‘Cutting a mao or two doesn’t help us either way. If we cut too much, the farmers won’t accept it — so we have no choice but to forfeit the deposit,’ said Mr Liu, a buyer in Youshui Township. Of the oranges he had pre-booked at 2.8 yuan, roughly half the contracts had already been broken.
Locally, the deposit on a jin of oranges works out at about 0.5 yuan. Once the gap between the contracted price and the open market price grows too wide, walking away becomes almost inevitable. Farmers drag on waiting, and the buyers simply cancel. One farmer booked his orchard out at 2.7 yuan, had the deal cancelled, then rebooked at 1.8 yuan — and saw that cancelled too. Locals joke: ‘Marry, divorce, remarry — now even the second marriage can’t hold.’
Looking back, a farmer like Old Cheng who booked early and harvested early has actually been extremely fortunate. Even he admitted: ‘Last year’s fruit was booked early too, and the price went up later on — who could have known that booking early this year would turn out to be the most expensive option?’ He told us that a farmer in the same village who grows around one hundred thousand jin had the chance to sell at 2.6 yuan but refused to move, convinced prices would recover. Then the frost drew near, and in the end he had to sell at a pittance.
VI. Self-Rescue After the Frost
What should the farmers who still have fruit to sell actually do? This was the question I kept coming back to throughout my interviews.
Most are still waiting. Those with the means are harvesting and storing on their own, hoping for a price recovery after the frost so they can unload then. But without buyers to take fruit into storage, farmers have to find their own solutions: most, like Liao Hai’s family, are asking relatives and friends to help pick, renting warehouse space, and either bagging the fruit themselves or spraying preservative so it will last in storage. It costs money and labour, but if the volume is not too large, these problems can still be handled on one’s own.
“After all, selling the fruit now means a loss anyway — why not take a gamble?” This is the prevailing mindset among fruit farmers.
But the real question is: will prices actually rise after the frost?
The optimists argue that the panic is merely a short-term reaction to the cold snap and that the market will normalise in time; that a share of navel oranges will be damaged by frost on the trees, reducing supply, and that prices should naturally recover. The pessimists, however, believe that total navel orange output is simply too large — a frost cannot change the fundamental balance of supply and demand or shift consumer trends. Whether the fruit sits with the farmers or the merchants, there are so many oranges that digesting them later will still be difficult; and once the Shehtang mandarins, Wogan mandarins and other competitors hit the shelves, navel oranges will have even less of a market.
Whichever prediction proves correct, one thing is certain: step outside Ganzhou and look at the country at large, and competition in the citrus market is fierce. On Douyin, beneath a short video of Ganzhou fruit farmers airing their woes, the most-liked comment — apart from the farmers themselves comparing who is worse off — read: “Wait a little longer, and Guangxi’s Shehtang mandarins, Emperor mandarins and Wogan mandarins will show you who’s boss.”
The online rivalry between regions has a real basis. In Ganzhou, most farmers believe that cheaper oranges from other regions have intensified local competition. One farmer told me that a buyer had trucked in a load of oranges from Hunan and was selling them for as little as 1.3 yuan on arrival in Ganzhou — a price that would only guarantee a loss for local farmers. The farmers also insist the quality of those oranges falls short of Ganzhou’s, and that this is the real reason they are cheaper — Liao Hai’s uncle by marriage told me he had once peeled an orange from another region and it simply lacked the fragrant aroma of a Gannan navel orange.
Worth noting is that during the 2023 harvest season, governments at all levels in Ganzhou stepped up enforcement against non-local oranges. Authorities not only issued directives telling buyers not to purchase oranges from elsewhere, but even set up checkpoints on motorways to stop lorries; any buyer found carrying oranges from other regions faces a fine. To locals, this is not only a safeguard for the Gannan navel orange Geographical Indication but also the government’s response to the market’s slump.
Secretary Zou added that the Huichang County government is already compiling figures on unsold local navel orange output and that some sales-support measures may follow. But with a nationwide glut of navel oranges and citrus fruit in general, it remains to be seen whether distant solutions can quench an immediate thirst.
Farmers, for their part, have long since begun taking matters into their own hands: selling oranges through short videos and online shops, or relying on referrals from relatives and friends. This is why a popular online quip has spread: “Every Jiangxi person on your WeChat Moments is selling oranges.”
Liao Hai’s elder sister Fengche, who works in Guangzhou, has not only set up a WeChat group to help the family sell, but has also approached fruit shops in Guangzhou, securing orders for several hundred jin of navel oranges. One farmer also told me that his nephew’s company might be able to source a batch of oranges. Through these channels, most can sustain a retail price above four yuan per jin; even after courier costs, the farmer still clears over three yuan. Even if volumes are low, the margins are far better than at the rock-bottom purchase price.
When the “Gannan navel orange” brand was being established, the domestic fruit market was nowhere near as “cut-throat”, and navel oranges could still command premium prices. As recently as five or six years ago, migrant workers from Huichang were swept up in a wave of returning home to invest in orange cultivation. Arriving at middle age, they would take the savings from years of city work, plant a hillside of navel orange trees, and secure their retirement — that was their hope. But in recent years, and especially with this year’s downturn in the navel orange market, this cohort of newer farmers has lost whatever hope they had left in the crop.
VII. Cheap Fruit, Suffering Farmers — The Same Story Again
But whether it is a change of variety or an upgrade in quality, both require government support, matching sales channels, and not least significant investment. Even well-capitalised, well-informed enterprises face enormous risk in trying to drive such a transformation — let alone ordinary fruit farmers.
When farmers lacking information, capital and social resources are hit by market volatility, the familiar drama of cheap fruit devastating the farmer is bound to play out again and again.
Perhaps the most honest words came from one farmer: “So many people have been catching colds lately — why don’t they get Zhong Nanshan to say a few more words? Who knows, the navel oranges might sell after all!”
And indeed, with a depressed market and no one to lean on, what else does a farmer have to hope for besides an expert’s single sentence?
Editor: Tianle