Although grafted mangosteen trees can shorten the waiting time for flowering and fruiting, many of them usually take five years before they enter the fruit-bearing period.
Mangosteen, which has just entered the fruiting period, can bear few fruits in the first year. Some trees can only bear single-digit fruits, and by the fifth year, they can only bear more than 200 fruits. The economic life of mangosteen is very long, which can reach more than 70 years. Only those decades-old trees can bear thousands of mangosteen fruits. This is a kind of fruit tree with higher age and higher yield.
I think there may be two reasons. The commercial mangosteen cultivation area in Hainan is not very wide, and the time for commercial mangosteen cultivation in Hainan is not long. This output is not too big, and the domestic market is big, so the output is a drop in the bucket, which will not affect the price of mangosteen.
The second reason is the import. Vietnamese bananas are sold for 14 yuan a catty in China. It is not surprising that mangosteen, which has a small domestic output, sells at a high price.
First of all, mangosteen is a tropical fruit, which has very high requirements on temperature and soil and land.
Secondly, although the mangosteen yield is high, because the mangosteen tree is as high as 15 to 20 meters, the mangosteen shell is fragile and cannot be directly knocked down, so it can only be picked manually on the tree, so the cost will be more expensive.
Then, the demand is great. Before the 1990s, fruits in China were basically worthless. However, with the improvement of living conditions, people's demand for fruits increased. Some tropical fruits could not be planted in most parts of China, which led to a sharp increase in consumption, and the price of supply and demand naturally rose.
The increase of transportation cost is also the reason why mangosteen is expensive. Mangosteen's own fresh-keeping ability is relatively poor, and it will go bad after 1.2 days, so it ripens in transit under semi-ripe conditions like other tropical fruits, but mangosteen needs to be kept fresh in time whether it is picked in advance or transported, which undoubtedly increases the transportation cost.