During the Spring Festival this year, Beijing vegetable price rises arrived about two weeks earlier than usual. To be more specific, the vegetable prices started to surge as of December 8th, lunar calendar. This is mainly due to the continuous smog weather and the following cold wave. These bad weather conditions caused the instability of vegetable supply and prices in Beijing as well as the whole country.
From the beginning of November 2015, most of the cities in the northern region suffered from poor air quality, smog weather. Coupled with continuous cloudy weather, greenhouse vegetables were in lack of sufficient sunshine. Taking cucumbers as an example, cucumbers from Langfang city in Hebei province, and Weifang city in Shandong province are infected with grey mold disease, and the cucumber growers had no choice but to remove the cucumber seeding and replant new ones. Under such circumstances, the listed time for cucumbers is delayed accordingly from January 2016 to the end of February, when the spring festival season already passes.
For the Spring Festival cucumber supply, wholesalers can only count on Lingyuan region from Liaoning Province. Unfortunately this region suffered from insufficient sunshine, which led to the short supply of cucumbers across the whole country. Therefore the cucumber prices have been continuously climbing.
