by Cristobal Chavez Bravo
SANTIAGO, Dec. 27 (Xinhua) -- Nearly 90 percent of Chilean cherries end up on dining room tables across China, especially during the Chinese holiday season.
According to Chile's Fruit Exporters Association, 88 percent of the harvest in the 2018-2019 season was shipped to China, and the figure in the 2019-2020 season is expected to match or surpass that record.
A typical crate of freshly picked cherries begins its journey in Lampa, a rural community in the greater Santiago Metropolitan Region, surrounded by fertile valleys and cherry orchards.
Here, Finca Chicauma, a cherry farm operated by Nativa Foods, features 30 hectares of land that produces between 150 and 200 tons of cherries each year, with 95 percent of them destined for Chinese households.
Pablo Morales, export director of Nativa Foods, told Xinhua that "very good sales" to China led the company to begin planting cherries in 2007.
"Today, like most Chilean industries, our main goal is to export the fruit to the Chinese market, which has seen quite interesting growth in recent years," said Morales.
"In the same way, we have become more demanding in terms of quality and in terms of variety," he added.
The farm grows a range of cherry types, from red Lapins, Royal Dawn, Brooks and Santina, varieties exported to China, to the yellow Rainier, he said.
Picking season begins in November, which marks the arrival of summer in the Southern Hemisphere, as China enters winter.
Some 80 pickers manually pick the cherries from trees that average 1.5 to 2.5 meters in height, but the farm plans to incorporate some Chinese technology to modernize its production.
Advanced agricultural drones from China will be used to better monitor the orchards and keep fruit-eating birds at bay, Morales said.
The cherries are then shipped to packing centers in refrigerated trucks which can keep the fruit at between 8 and 10 degrees Celsius for freshness.
The Merquen packing plant located in Paine, in the southern metropolitan region, processes products for Nativa Foods.
Along the way, Chinese importers, such as Alonso Xu, general manager of the Fushun Fruit SpA, said the plant has just bought a world-class processing mechanism to ensure the fruit arrives in optimum condition.
The Fushun Fruit SpA expects to export 1,000 tons of cherries by the end of the 2019-2020 season.
The season's first cargo flight carrying more than 100 tons of cherries arrived in the city of Ningbo, in east China's Zhejiang Province, in late November after a 30-hour travel from Chile.
Cherries are arriving just in time for the Chinese Lunar New Year, or Spring Festival, which falls on Jan. 25, 2020.
"Cherries have been a good option as presents during celebrations in China," Xu added.