How China's Mugwort Industry Can Enter the International Market

On May 28, the two-day First World Mugwort Industry Conference and the Third Li Shizhen Qichun Mugwort Health Tourism Culture Festival came to a close in Qichun, Hubei, with more than 2,000 guests from the United States, Africa, Malaysia, Ukraine and several other countries in attendance. At the opening ceremony, Wu Zhendou, deputy director of the Department of International Cooperation of the National Administration of Traditional Chinese Medicine, said the conference would provide a platform for display, exchange and cooperation for the global mugwort industry and promote its international development. In this connection, a reporter from China Economic Times conducted an exclusive interview with Ji Kai, founder and president of the World Mugwort Industry Conference.

The mugwort industry is at a time of rapid expansion and development

Ji Kai said that before creating the World Mugwort Industry Conference brand, Beijing Dayitang Group had already founded the International Moxibustion Conference. It has been held for four consecutive sessions, with each one more popular than the last, which shows that the mugwort industry is at a time of rapid expansion and development.

Facts have proved that Ji Kai's confidence was not unfounded. At this conference, more than 2,000 guests, including traditional Chinese medicine practitioners from a total of five countries around the world, attended, showing that the mugwort industry is no longer an isolated activity in a few cities and counties, but has a huge industrial base and practitioner base.

Ji Kai introduced that the host venue of this conference, Qichun County in Hubei, achieved an output value of 2 billion yuan last year relying on mugwort alone. Taking advantage of this conference, the Qichun County People's Government carried out investment promotion around the mugwort industry chain. During the festival, the total agreed investment reached 6.384 billion yuan. It can be seen that the potential of the mugwort industry, market potential and investment potential are enormous. Ji Kai believes that with the holding of this conference, Qichun County will soon achieve the goal of an annual output value of 10 billion yuan. This is the commercial potential tapping and radiating function brought about by the conference.

Although this conference was held in Qichun, Hubei, in fact eight provincial and municipal governments, including those of Henan Province, Hunan Province, Shaanxi Province, Shanxi Province and Shandong Province, all sent special personnel to participate in this grand event, and all stated that they would next carry out large-scale mugwort planting, realizing the original intention of the World Mugwort Industry Conference: guiding more local governments across the country to participate, expanding the mugwort planting area, and thereby truly activating the potential of the national mugwort industry.

When the reporter asked what main problems currently exist in the development of China's mugwort industry, Ji Kai believed they are mainly concentrated in the following four aspects.

First, the current development of China's mugwort industry is in an extremely unbalanced state. Nationwide, there are only two major mugwort industry cluster areas, Qichun in Hubei and Nanyang in Henan, which has caused regions with a relatively high mugwort brand profile to face a situation in which supply falls short of demand at their places of origin, thus leading to year-on-year increases in the price of mugwort raw materials.

Second, the distribution of large-area mugwort planting and large-scale planting across the country is uneven, mainly also concentrated in the two major mugwort industry cluster areas. Apart from that, other individual provinces and cities are still in the trial period.

Third, there is no national standard for mugwort planting, and there is a lack of unified evaluation indicators for the quality of mugwort in different places, with opinions varying widely. The national standard is in a blank period, while local standards and industry standards are also in an exploratory and preparatory period.

Fourth, there is a lack of national standards for the use of mugwort as food. Mugwort has not yet been included in the category of medicine and food homology, which restricts the development of mugwort for large-scale use in the food industry.


For the industrialized development of mugwort, what policy measures are still needed at the national level? Ji Kai believes that, first, although mugwort is a medicinal material, compared with other traditional Chinese medicines, it is not a conventional medicine in traditional Chinese medicine prescriptions. Its greatest use is still in the field of moxibustion, and as the “International Moxibustion Conference” has been held enthusiastically for four consecutive sessions, the national moxibustion health preservation industry has shown tremendous development, and demand for mugwort is also increasing sharply.

Second, as a good medicine for physicians, mugwort has always been mainly wild, and local governments have attached seriously insufficient importance to wild protection and large-scale planting.

Based on the above situation, it is hoped that local governments and the national level can provide subsidies and policy support to mugwort planting enterprises in terms of land, seedling cultivation, purchasing, processing and production; in addition, it is called for all localities to issue policies to protect local native mugwort and provide tax reductions and interest-free loan support to mugwort production enterprises. Priority should be given to mugwort planting enterprises for multi-level national subsidies in agriculture, tourism, Chinese medicinal materials and other areas.

Finally, Ji Kai said he hopes that through the continued holding of the World Mugwort Industry Conference, the following improvements can be brought to the current situation of the mugwort industry.

First, it is hoped that the founding and continued holding of the World Mugwort Industry Conference can change the relatively extensive state in which China's mugwort industry currently remains, greatly prosper the mugwort planting market, and then use the dual-wheel drive of “industrial competition forcing progress and industrial scale pushing development” to accelerate the introduction of relevant mugwort standards.

Second, it is hoped that the continued holding of the World Mugwort Industry Conference will lead more provinces to participate in the trend of mugwort planting, thereby greatly prospering the mugwort raw material market. Because only with sufficient raw material supply can the cost of moxibustion be reduced from the terminal end, can moxibustion health preservation enter thousands of households, allowing more people to enjoy and use moxibustion, and then feed back into the moxibustion industry, so that the entire moxibustion market can achieve greater, leapfrog and healthy development.

Third, because mugwort is a wild medicinal material, local governments attach seriously insufficient importance to mugwort, or even turn a blind eye to it. This is seriously detrimental to protecting the diversified development of China's mugwort varieties. It is hoped that through the holding of the World Mugwort Industry Conference, more people can be continuously influenced and more government levels can attach importance to mugwort, because only in this way can the sustainable development of the entire mugwort industry be realized.

Fourth, the development of an industry cannot be separated from a platform. If an industry does not even have a large-scale national conference platform, then it is very difficult for that industry to form a sector known to the world. The founding of the World Mugwort Industry Conference is precisely to help the entire industry develop toward a higher level, larger scale and greater order from the perspective of the industry!

Fifth, it is hoped that the moxibustion industry can closely follow the pace of the “Belt and Road” strategy of traditional Chinese medicine and strive, through the platform of the World Mugwort Industry Conference, to create six major functional mugwort themes: “build a mugwort industry trade platform; develop health tourism at mugwort bases; protect distinctive native mugwort varieties; assess the quality grades of mugwort varieties; build regional mugwort ecological culture; tap the functional utilization value of mugwort”, so as to realize the sustainable and healthy development of China's mugwort industry.