On the 7th of October, Zhecheng county (Shangqiu city) held an opening ceremony in a pepper production garden to celebrate the first edition of the hot pepper festival. Zhecheng county had already been named 'Chinese village of cherry peppers' by the Ministry of Agriculture once before.
The county introduced a new plant variety of cherry peppers in the seventies and has thus cultivated the peppers for 40 years. The peppers from Zhecheng county have already brought forth several kinds of peppers and farmers had already developed many kinds of cultivation methods, like interplanting. The cultivation land has an area of 2,667 hectares and a yearly output of more than 12,000 tons. This makes it the largest production area in all China. For the past few years, committee members and politicians of Zhecheng county have relied on the advantage of natural resources for peppers. With their support Zhecheng manages to dominate more than 30% of the market in peppers every year.
