Harbin carrots sold far to Thailand, Vietnam and Russia in 2015

Another large truck drove in, and after being loaded with 40 tons of pearl onions it will head for Guangxi, where the pearl onions will be repackaged before being shipped to Thailand and Vietnam. After the onset of winter, exports of pearl onions from Taiping Village, Lalin Town, Wuchang City, have hardly stopped. Reporters learned from the Harbin Municipal Agricultural Commission that last year Harbin sold and exported 200,000 tons of vegetables; besides domestic regions such as Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, Russia, South Korea, Japan and Thailand are also destinations for Harbin vegetables.

Taiping Village in Lalin Town is about 50 km from Harbin and has a long history of vegetable growing; Chinese cabbage, cabbage and pearl onions have become the local main vegetable crops thanks to their outstanding quality. Every year after pearl onions come to market in July and August, many vegetable wholesalers gather in Lalin to buy them. Tong Lijun, head of the Changqing Vegetable Farmers' Professional Planting Cooperative in Taiping Village, said that because pearl onion prices are low during the marketing period, some large buyers transport them to warehouses elsewhere for storage after purchase, and then sell and export them after prices rise in winter. To increase profits, the Changqing Cooperative built a large constant-temperature cold storage with a capacity of more than 4,000 tons in the village the year before last; while renting warehouse space to wholesalers, it also stored large quantities of its own vegetables to seek market price differences. Tong Lijun told reporters that the price of pearl onions now leaving the warehouse has tripled compared with when they first came to market; this winter they stored more than 1,000 tons of pearl onions in their warehouse, almost all of which were transported out by wholesalers and finally sold to Thailand and Vietnam.

Yuanye Village in Hulan District had already sold its locally main crop of carrots far to Russia around early autumn. Zhang Benlu, chairman of the Linong Vegetable Cooperative in the village, introduced that before the carrots came to market, the cooperative sent people to many places to look for new markets and finally contacted several border trade merchants in the Mudanjiang area. After inspecting the production conditions in Yuanye Village on site, the other party was very satisfied and sent large trucks to haul them almost every day; the average daily purchase volume accounted for 40 percent of the cooperative's sales, and at most 100,000 jin of carrots were taken away in a single day.

According to the relevant person in charge of the Harbin Municipal Agricultural Commission, besides carrots, Harbin also exports large quantities of potatoes, tomatoes and other vegetables to Russia. In addition, Japan and South Korea are also export destinations for Harbin vegetables, although they prefer Chinese cabbage.