China fuels Philippines pineapple exports to record $787 million earnings in 2024

MANILA, Philippines — China’s growing appetite for pineapples pushed the Philippines’ export of the prized commodity to record earnings of almost $800 million last year, the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) said.

Earnings from exports of pineapples and pineapple products went up by 7.5 percent on an annual basis to $787.12 million, the PSA said.

More than half of the export receipts came from shipments of fresh or dried pineapples, which rose by a little over a fifth year-on-year to $428.74 million, PSA data showed.

The country exported $183.43 million worth of pineapples to China last year, almost 18 percent higher than the $155.73 million recorded in 2023. China remained as the top destination for the country’s pineapples.

The Philippines also shipped a record volume of 675,540 MT of fresh or dried pineapples last year, with 42 percent or about 282,460 MT going to China, based on PSA data.

The United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) earlier said that Philippine pineapple exports in 2024 would rise to a new record level as Chinese consumers demand more premium pineapples, especially the MD2 variety from the Philippines.

“The long shelf life, year-round production cycle and attractive price-to-quality ratio of the MD2 pineapples, the main variety cultivated in the Philippines, proved to be a particularly strong selling point,” the FAO said in a report.

The Philippines has been China’s top supplier of pineapples, accounting for about 90 percent of the Asian country’s annual import volume in the past two decades.

The Philippines has also been the world’s second biggest exporter of pineapples, behind only Costa Rica in the past 15 years, according to the FAO.

Industry players have emphasized that pineapple would be the Philippines’ next billion-dollar export product because of growing global demand.

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and FAO have projected that one out of four pineapples produced in the Philippines would be exported by 2033

“The Philippines is one of the major exporters of pineapples and it is expected that this trend remains stable over the coming 10 years. The share in global exports is not changing strongly,” OECD senior agricultural policy analyst Hubertus Gay told The STAR in an earlier interview.

The country’s export of other pineapple products last year also posted growth particularly in the shipments of prepared and preserved pineapples as well as unfermented pineapple juice.

Export earnings from prepared or preserved pineapples rose by two percent year-on-year to $220.49 million while the value of unfermented pineapple juice exports expanded by 35 percent to $101.68 million.

Meanwhile, exports of pineapple juice with a brix value not exceeding 20 fell by more than half year-on-year to $36.21 million.

Local pineapple production last year was valued at nearly P30 billion, accounting for some two percent of the country’s P1.8-trillion gross value added in agriculture, fisheries and forestry.

Volume wise, the country’s pineapple production has been on an upward trend, reaching almost three million MT in 2024. It was some 800,000 MT higher than the almost 2.2 million MT recorded output 15 years ago.