u***r
发帖数: 4825 | 1 Shell Shock: Chinese Demand Reshapes U.S. Pecan Business
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870407680457618077
Pecans are as all-American as anything can be. Washington and Jefferson grew
them. They are the state nut of Arkansas, Alabama and Texas. The U.S. grows
about two-thirds of the world's pecans and chews most of them itself.
For generations, pecan prices have fallen with bumper crops and soared with
lousy ones. But lately, they've only been going up. A pound of pecans in the
shell fetched $2.14 on average last year, according to the U.S Department
of Agriculture, nearly double what they brought three years earlier.
The reason: The Chinese want our nuts.
Five years ago, China bought hardly any pecans. In 2009, China bought one-
quarter of the U.S. crop, and there's no sign demand is abating.
Nuts for Pecans
View Slideshow
[SB10001424052748704893604576200842041628326]
Brandon Thibodeaux for The Wall Street Journal
Pecans, including these in the hands of George Martin, president of Navarro
Pecan Co., show how China is reshaping entire industries in its trading
partners.
* More photos and interactive graphics
At a Carrefour store near Beijing's Sanyuan Bridge, Liu Wei, a 61-year-old
retired chemistry teacher, is buying a 260-gram (9.1-ounce) bag of Orchard
Farmer U.S.-grown pecans for 38 yuan ($5.78). That's nearly six times
Beijing's official minimum hourly wage. "We used to eat only walnuts, and
then we saw on TV that pecans are more nutritious than walnuts," she says.
"Pecans are very good for the brain. We older people should eat more pecans
so that we don't get Alzheimer's," Ms. Liu adds. "My husband has
cardiovascular disease, and Beijing TV said eating pecans can help." She has
asked her pregnant daughter-in-law to eat two pecans a day because, she
says, "pecans are very good for baby's brain development."
Pecans offer a case study in how China is reshaping entire industries for
its trading partners—and not only by exporting goods made by its low-wage
workers.
Nearly $1 of every $5 China spent on U.S. items last year went to buy food
of some sort, $16.6 billion worth, according to the U.S. Department of
Commerce. U.S. exports of goods of all sorts to China more than doubled
between 2005 and 2010. Exports of crops and processed foods—soybeans, dairy
, rice, fruit juice—more than tripled. Exports of pecans rose more than 20-
fold.
"What's changed in our business?" asks second-generation pecan merchant and
sheller George Martin, president of Navarro Pecan Co. in Corsicana, Texas. "
The Chinese entered…and they have been getting bigger and bigger and bigger
."
[PECANS_P1]
The dynamics are simple. "We're in a situation of finite supply and
seemingly infinite demand," says Thomas Stevenson, a Georgia pecan grower
and merchant. Eventually, more trees will be planted, but a pecan takes
eight to 10 years to bear fruit.
For now, life is good for pecan growers, who produce about $550 million a
year worth of nuts at today's prices. Grower Bill Goff sold the entire crop
of his 1,800 acres of Georgia pecans to Chinese buyers last year. But he's
not putting the profits into a sports car. Instead, he is buying up another
500 acres of pecan orchards. In Georgia, he says, pecan orchards hovered
between $3,000 and $3,800 an acre five years ago. Today, they sell for
between $4,500 and $6,000 an acre.
While China's appetite for pecans has been a windfall for growers, it poses
a challenge for pecan shellers—the middlemen who separate nut from shell
and then sell the insides to food companies, grocery stories and direct to
consumers.
For some shellers, the trouble is simply getting the nuts they need before
the Chinese buy them. For others, it's about coping with volatile prices to
avoid profit-reducing squeezes. This can happen if they pledge to sell nuts
at prices that turn out to be below market, or if they try to time purchases
only to end up buying at the peak.
View Full Image
PECANS_JMP
PECANS_JMP
PECANS_JMP
For bakers and ice cream makers, it's all pain. "It's certainly not very
pleasant," says Bob McNutt, president of Collin Street Bakers, also of
Corsicana, which has been selling pecan-packed fruitcakes for more than 100
years. About three-quarters of Mr. McNutt's sales are from fruitcakes, and
27% of the weight of each fruitcake is pecans. Prices of the pecans he buys
are 50% higher than any previous peak. Customers, he says delicately, "are
not going to be willing...to participate in absorbing the cost."
In September, though, Collin did raise the price of a 1-lb., 14-oz. deluxe
fruitcake by $1.10, or 4.8%, to $23.95, before shipping costs. Mr. McNutt
says he'll decide in May whether to increase prices again. He worries that
if he boosts prices too much, sticker shock will lead some customers to go
without fruitcake next Christmas.
At Stuckey's, a seller of snack pecans popular in the eastern U.S., the
strategy is to reduce the size of cans, the quantity of pecans in them and
the sticker price—but raise the price per ounce. It is also to look to
China.
"We're in discussions to export Stuckey's pecans to Asia where we know the
growing middle class is increasing demand for premium American brands," says
Charles Rosencrans, Stuckey's chief executive.
Pecans are a peculiar nut. Walnuts and almonds are grown in the U.S. almost
exclusively in California; hazelnuts mostly in Oregon. Pecans, in contrast,
grow across the South from New Mexico to Georgia as well as in northern
Mexico. That means the types of pecans, their growing seasons and the cost
of production vary widely. Further fragmenting the market, between 20% and
30% of all pecans harvested in the U.S. are from wild groves, which makes it
tough for the industry to estimate the size of harvests and for growers to
coordinate.
View Full Image
PECANS-0418
PECANS-0418
PECANS-0418
Also, growers of walnuts, almonds and hazelnuts are organized into groups,
or cartels, that can essentially set prices and decide how many nuts to sell
and how many to save for the following year. Pecan growers don't have such
groups, and so have no collective strategy for dealing with the Chinese or
other unexpected shifts in the market.
Over time, pecan growers and merchants figured out ways to thrive. Because
pecans, more than other nut trees, bear heavily one year and lightly the
next—and because the nuts freeze well—companies set aside some nuts in
cold storage in good years and sell them in the lean ones.
Machines have been developed to shake nuts from the tree at harvest, and
others sweep them off the ground. In shelling plants, nut crackers, conveyer
belts, mechanical sorters, laser and infrared inspectors are joined in a
Rube Goldberg contraption. These machines bathe nuts in hot water to kill
bacteria, crack them, separate meat from shell, segregate intact halves from
smaller pieces, skim out tiny worms, roast nuts and then chop and sort
pieces by size and color.
Pecans traditionally made their way from U.S. and Mexican growers to the
eight or so major shellers in the U.S. In good years, says Daniel Zedan, a
long-time pecan broker in Wayne, Ill., the price paid for the nuts would
fall and growers would complain "that the shellers had cheated them." In bad
years, growers would demand higher prices, "leading shellers to feel that
they had been taken advantage of," he says. Some businesses prospered,
others failed. But overall, growers and shellers kept each other in check.
All this changed when China entered the picture. In 2007, the U.S. had a
bumper pecan crop amid a global shortage of walnuts. That pushed the price
of pecans below the price of walnuts, which in the nut business is something
like the price of gold falling below the price of silver. The Chinese, who
grow and import a lot of walnuts, bought 47 million pounds of pecans that
year, four times the previous year's total, estimates pecan broker Mr. Zedan.
Chinese consumers, it turned out, liked pecans, and they were easier to
shell than native Chinese hickory and other nuts. Chinese traders mainly buy
pecans in the shell in the U.S., ship them to China where they are cracked,
often by hand one at time, and then are marinated in a flavoring brine,
roasted and sold in the partially cracked shell as a popular snack,
particularly during the Lunar New Year.
American shellers complained that selling so many premium pecans to China—
the Chinese want the biggest, best nuts—would undermine both the domestic
market and export markets in Europe. So they held back orders. China
responded by going directly to growers. As Texas A&M pecan expert Jose Pena
puts it: "It's kind of hard to tell a grower not to sell to the highest
bidder."
In 2008, an off year for pecan production, China bought 53 million pounds,
more than they did the previous year. And in 2009, an on-year for pecans but
not a particularly big one, they bought 83 million pounds, more than all
the pecans the U.S. exported to the rest of the world that year. With so
little left in storage from the previous year and with the crop later than
usual, the demand pushed the price higher.
"A month before harvest," says Mr. Stevenson, the Georgia grower, "your
email fills up, you get phone calls. One of our best [Chinese] customers
called my partner here at 2 a.m. looking for nuts."
In 2010, the price went higher still. The price of the size of nuts favored
by the Chinese—"junior mammoth halves," defined by USDA standards as 251 to
300 pecan halves to the pound—is now at $6.95 a pound, compared to $3.35
just two years earlier, by Mr. Zedan's tally.
With the Chinese buying so many nuts, exports to other markets have been
crowded out. Some domestic buyers have had trouble getting the sort of nuts
they want. One sheller went under last year; its plants were sold to the
King Ranch, the big closely held Texas agribusiness that got into the pecan
business by acquisition in 2006. Another sheller told customers in November
it couldn't honor its contracts.
At Navarro Pecan, the Texas sheller, Mr. Martin frets that if prices keep
rising, Americans will simply make fewer pecan pies. At today's grocery-
store prices a pecan pie takes between $5.50 and $7.50 worth of pecans,
depending on the recipe.
But he is hardly discouraged. "Adapt or die," he says. "After four years of
being stupid, we look at the Chinese differently—as just another competitor
."
Then he checks his cellphone messages. A Chinese trader has heard that he
has a stockpile of pecans and wants to talk.
"It's the second time he's called," Mr. Martin says. Asked if he is planning
to return the call, Mr. Martin smiles and says, "Nope. I'm going to wait
till the price gets higher." | d***y
发帖数: 8536 | | h***i
发帖数: 89031 | 3 这个用不着担心把，谁想限制中国购买美国农产品，美国人民就把它消灭了
grew
grows
with
the
【在 u***r 的大作中提到】
: Shell Shock: Chinese Demand Reshapes U.S. Pecan Business
: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870407680457618077
: Pecans are as all-American as anything can be. Washington and Jefferson grew
: them. They are the state nut of Arkansas, Alabama and Texas. The U.S. grows
: about two-thirds of the world's pecans and chews most of them itself.
: For generations, pecan prices have fallen with bumper crops and soared with
: lousy ones. But lately, they've only been going up. A pound of pecans in the
: shell fetched $2.14 on average last year, according to the U.S Department
: of Agriculture, nearly double what they brought three years earlier.
: The reason: The Chinese want our nuts.
| s******n
发帖数: 793 | 4 美国人给中国人打下工不行么
反正他们地大部分都荒废着靠从政府拿补贴混日子
现在给中国打打工也不错啊
可以自力更生了
劳动光荣 | c*****i
发帖数: 11737 | 5 pecan 在国内是小资的最爱，价格很高
grew
grows
with
the
【在 u***r 的大作中提到】
: Shell Shock: Chinese Demand Reshapes U.S. Pecan Business
: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870407680457618077
: Pecans are as all-American as anything can be. Washington and Jefferson grew
: them. They are the state nut of Arkansas, Alabama and Texas. The U.S. grows
: about two-thirds of the world's pecans and chews most of them itself.
: For generations, pecan prices have fallen with bumper crops and soared with
: lousy ones. But lately, they've only been going up. A pound of pecans in the
: shell fetched $2.14 on average last year, according to the U.S Department
: of Agriculture, nearly double what they brought three years earlier.
: The reason: The Chinese want our nuts.
| d********n
发帖数: 68 | 6
Really? I thought it's pistachio nuts?
【在 c*****i 的大作中提到】
: pecan 在国内是小资的最爱，价格很高
:
: grew
: grows
: with
: the
| L*********d
发帖数: 7037 | 7 是叫美国核桃吗?
【在 c*****i 的大作中提到】
: pecan 在国内是小资的最爱，价格很高
:
: grew
: grows
: with
: the
| r*****g
发帖数: 9999 | 8 第一次听说state nut这个说法，太搞笑了。
grew
grows
with
the
【在 u***r 的大作中提到】
: Shell Shock: Chinese Demand Reshapes U.S. Pecan Business
: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870407680457618077
: Pecans are as all-American as anything can be. Washington and Jefferson grew
: them. They are the state nut of Arkansas, Alabama and Texas. The U.S. grows
: about two-thirds of the world's pecans and chews most of them itself.
: For generations, pecan prices have fallen with bumper crops and soared with
: lousy ones. But lately, they've only been going up. A pound of pecans in the
: shell fetched $2.14 on average last year, according to the U.S Department
: of Agriculture, nearly double what they brought three years earlier.
: The reason: The Chinese want our nuts.
|
| a****l
发帖数: 8211 | 9 "The Chinese want our nuts"??
LOL, I wonder how many American man are willing to give up their nuts...
grew
grows
with
the
【在 u***r 的大作中提到】
: Shell Shock: Chinese Demand Reshapes U.S. Pecan Business
: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870407680457618077
: Pecans are as all-American as anything can be. Washington and Jefferson grew
: them. They are the state nut of Arkansas, Alabama and Texas. The U.S. grows
: about two-thirds of the world's pecans and chews most of them itself.
: For generations, pecan prices have fallen with bumper crops and soared with
: lousy ones. But lately, they've only been going up. A pound of pecans in the
: shell fetched $2.14 on average last year, according to the U.S Department
: of Agriculture, nearly double what they brought three years earlier.
: The reason: The Chinese want our nuts.
| d******g
发帖数: 6966 | 10 中国卖也不行买也不行...白猪的思路就是大便...龙卷风应该多卷死几个 | | | c*****i
发帖数: 11737 | 11 碧根果吧
【在 L*********d 的大作中提到】
: 是叫美国核桃吗?
| c****3
发帖数: 6038 | 12 不像国产核桃
就叫美国核桃
椭球的
我很喜欢吃
特别是咸味的
【在 c*****i 的大作中提到】
: 碧根果吧
| c*****i
发帖数: 11737 | 13 起码在上海叫碧根果
【在 c****3 的大作中提到】
: 不像国产核桃
: 就叫美国核桃
: 椭球的
: 我很喜欢吃
: 特别是咸味的
| c****3
发帖数: 6038 | 14 在北京就叫核桃
上海人崇洋媚外
就爱用个音译
【在 c*****i 的大作中提到】
: 起码在上海叫碧根果
| l******e
发帖数: 12192 | 15 很毛呀
【在 c*****i 的大作中提到】
: 起码在上海叫碧根果
| T4
发帖数: 273 | 16 音译应该是 "屁康果"吧
怎么会成逼根果
【在 c****3 的大作中提到】
: 在北京就叫核桃
: 上海人崇洋媚外
: 就爱用个音译
| L*********d
发帖数: 7037 | 17 上海发音你不懂
【在 T4 的大作中提到】
: 音译应该是 "屁康果"吧
: 怎么会成逼根果
| T4
发帖数: 273 | 18 就上海人说说
逼,
根
怎么发音
【在 L*********d 的大作中提到】
: 上海发音你不懂
| s***d
发帖数: 15421 | |
|
