China fresh produce export calendar

Jinxiang lifts in May and June and new-crop garlic starts shipping almost immediately, which is why the peak below sits in the second half of the year. From about December it is stored garlic, and it keeps shipping until the next harvest — so the shoulder band is every remaining month rather than a few weeks either side.

The number this trade watches is the new-crop price in June, because it sets what Spanish and Argentine garlic can be sold for the following winter. Availability is never the question on this row. What year’s garlic is in the box, and what it cost, is.

Shandong lifts ginger in October and November, so fresh new-crop rhizome ships from about November through the winter and stored ginger carries the rest of the year. There is no month without Chinese ginger; there are months in which all of it is a year old.

Ginger is chilling-sensitive even though it looks like a root vegetable and gets loaded like one — much below about 12°C it pits and goes translucent. That is a loading decision rather than a scheduling one, and it is the thing to check before the door closes on a mixed box.

Shandong and Shaanxi harvest from September, the export peak runs from October into the new year, and stored fruit ships through the spring. Fuji is most of what leaves.

The destinations are Southeast and South Asia rather than Europe — Vietnam, the Philippines, Indonesia, Bangladesh — on lanes of one to three weeks. Chinese and American apples are chasing the same buyers in the same months, and it is price rather than season that settles it.

Ya pear and Fragrant pear are harvested from August and ship from about September into the new year, then out of storage through the spring. China is by a wide margin the largest pear exporter in the world.

These are not the varieties a European buyer is used to. A Ya pear is bought and eaten as a different thing from a Packham’s, which means this row is not a substitute for the Southern Hemisphere programmes further up the page — it is a separate trade that happens to share a word.

Roughly November to January, out of Hunan, Jiangxi and Guangxi. The window lands on the Northern Hemisphere winter alongside Spain and Morocco, but the volume goes to Southeast Asia and Russia rather than west.

That is worth knowing when a European easy-peeler is being offered into an Asian market in December. The comparison the buyer is making is against fruit that travelled a week, not five, and the price on this row is what a Spanish or Moroccan programme has to answer.

Roughly April to July, into the gap between the Northern Hemisphere’s stored crop running out and its new one being lifted. The volume goes to Southeast Asia, Japan and Korea on short lanes.

Onions are a storage crop sold on timing, so the exposure is the same as Egypt’s: a shipment three weeks late lands into a market somebody else has already supplied. The difference is that China can ship again the following week, which makes this the row where a missed arrival is a margin problem rather than a lost season.