With thousands of unwanted bananas rotting in their fields, some farmers on the island of Hainan prefer to feed the fruit to their pigs instead of selling them at a loss on the market.

 In Hainan, shoppers can pick up bananas in markets for 1.2 yuan per kilogram, whereas farmers spend an average of 2 yuan for every kilogram that they harvest.

 Hainan officials blame the surplus on the weather, which pushed back their winter banana harvest, as well as a false rumor that a poisonous chemical had been used to ripen the bananas.

 “The temperature was unusually low last winter and delayed the sale of bananas grown in Hainan.  Bananas from the winter harvest were on the market at the same time as those harvested in spring in Guangzhou and Guangxi Province,” said Zhang Jian, from the Hainan Agriculture Office.

 “To make matters worse, the ethephon [chemical] rumor further contributed to the oversupply of bananas,” he added.

 Ethephon is used to accelerate the ripening of bananas. In April, 2011, it was wrongly reported that bananas artificially ripened by ethephon were harmful to health. The news caused panic among consumers in Hainan, Guangdong and Guangxi Province.

 “For every jin [500 grams] of bananas I sell, I lose 0.7 yuan,” said Wu Shenping, a 35-year-old banana grower who had invested over one million yuan in his banana plantation, “I dare not think about what I’m going to do in the future. I’m afraid I have to spend the rest of my life paying back the bank loan.”

 According to the statistics of Hainan Agricultural Office, the total harvest of bananas on the island this year stands at 1.9 million tons; 1.4 millions tons had been sold by the end of June.

Links and sources:

Yangtze Evening News 海南香蕉价格40天内由每公斤7.6元跌至0.4元

Caing Online 海南香蕉价格暴跌9成 政府倡议救市

Tecent Online 海南数十万斤香蕉烂于地或喂猪