With an average of 10 flower branches per person nationwide, why is Yunnan's flower industry still facing bottlenecks?

On the eve of the Spring Festival in 2017, when the night fell over the Spring City, the Dounan Flower Market was still as bright as day. Li Keqiang, then the Premier of the State Council, visited here. Touched by the vitality of the flower sea, he left his expectations for Dounan's future:

"The Dounan Flower Market is already number one in China and Asia. I hope you can strive to become number one in the world."

In 2024, Chenggong District in Kunming achieved a transaction volume of 14.1 billion stems, completing the annual transaction target of 13.8 billion stems, which was originally set for this year, one year ahead of schedule. This achievement is not far from the annual trading volume of 20 billion stems announced by Aalsmeer in the Netherlands, the world's largest flower market.

However, the approaching numbers do not mean that Dounan's goal of becoming "number one in the world" is within reach.

01 The Land of Romance

The industry status of Dounan's flowers is inseparable from its unique geographical environment. Located in Chenggong District of Kunming, Dounan Town is adjacent to the east bank of Dianchi Lake and has a large area of flat river valley land. Here, there is abundant sunshine and fertile soil, like a huge natural greenhouse. The high - quality status of the "Flower Capital of Asia" can be seen from a set of employment data:

According to public reports, among the 70,000 permanent residents in Dounan, 46,500 are engaged in flower - related work, involving 3,300 enterprises, and there are more than 15,000 business entities and individual industrial and commercial households.

The long - term situation of "no one going out for migrant work" further demonstrates the strong attractiveness of this industry in the local area.

In 2022, Dounan achieved a historic breakthrough of "both transaction volume and transaction value reaching 10 billion". The rise of the "romantic economy" confirms the potential of this land and gives it enough confidence to strive for the world's number one position.

However, behind this fragrant journey, there is an unnoticed battle.

In 1983, Hua Zhongyi, the director of the Improved Variety Farm in Chenggong County, successfully trial - planted a batch of gladioli in his own field. He sold them for 100 yuan on the day he took them to the market. This event was later regarded as the "beginning of commercial flower cultivation" in China. At that time, the annual income of local people was less than 200 yuan.

In the 1990s, villagers' vegetable fields were turned into flower fields one after another, expanding from the initial 0.3 mu to more than 2,500 mu. Every day before dawn, a long and narrow street in the town was crowded with baskets and bicycles full of flowers, and even traffic police had to be called in to direct the traffic.

▲In 1994, flower farmers sold flowers in Dounan. Source: Xinhua News Agency 

"One of the eighteen oddities in Yunnan is that flowers are sold by the catty", which tells the grass - roots origin of China's flower industry. This primitive expansion was soon involved in the wave of globalization. In the chaos, a new order emerged, and new problems also arose.

In 1995, Dounan built the first village - level flower market in the country, ending the roadside stall trading. In 1999, Kunming hosted the World Horticultural Exposition. Dounan was exposed to high - quality foreign flower varieties and industrial models for the first time in a systematic way, and at the same time, the world got to know China's commercial flowers for the first time.

But it was not until 2002, when the flower auction center started operating and Dounan's flowers were included in the global germplasm intellectual property norms, that many flower farmers still didn't understand what "seedling patents" were.

This soon became a resistance to Dounan's progress and has troubled it ever since.

Today, the Dounan Flower Market is a global - level market hub covering 117 categories and 1,600 varieties. The price of fresh - cut flowers here at night determines the market conditions across the country and even in the whole of Asia the next day. During the day, more than 7 million stems of flowers are sent from the flower auction center to more than 50 countries, which can fill a Boeing 747.

Its growth is like a city infrastructure documentary played at double speed. In the alternation between carrying poles and auction hammers, it quickly completed the transformation from a rural area to the "Flower Capital of Asia". However, it still faces huge difficulties and a large gap compared with the world's number one:

85% of the flowers it grows and sells are foreign varieties, and it is thus locked at the end of the value chain.

02 The Predicament of Germplasm Resources

China's dependence on overseas flower varieties is not a problem that emerged overnight. It started from a competition that China entered a hundred years late.

When China's flower industry was just starting from scratch, the germplasm gene bank for commercial flowers had not been established yet, but it was facing a global market that was already highly specialized and monopolized.

Even though Yunnan is known as the "Kingdom of Plants", due to the lack of domestication and improvement of its wild flower varieties, their flowering period, flower shape, and disease resistance are difficult to meet market standards. Since the popular cultivation of carnations in the 1980s, Dounan's flower farmers have been using "foreign seeds". Even the first batch of gladioli, which marked the "beginning of commercial flower cultivation", were introduced from other places.

Breeding is a marathon that involves time, technology, and capital. It takes about ten years to develop a competitive new variety from cross - breeding and selection to stable traits and then to market promotion.

While many flower farmers in Yunnan didn't even have the concept of "germplasm resources", the family - run breeding enterprises in the Netherlands had been passed down to the fourth generation. Just for roses, there are more than 30,000 sub - varieties.

So the problem at that time was not that local varieties were uncompetitive, but that there were hardly any local varieties on the market. Over time, what kind of flowers, colors, and shapes were popular in Dounan and even across the country were not determined by local demand, but by the annual new product catalogs of European breeding companies.

This state of dependence and following has run through Dounan's entire evolution history.

Choosing to import seedlings means having to adapt to the global system, namely the International Convention for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants (UPOV). Under this regulation, what flower farmers buy is not a seed that can be infinitely reproduced, but more like a "seedling patent fee", a license with strict usage restrictions.

The so - called "seedling patent fee" payment process mainly consists of two parts:

One is the price of the imported seedlings themselves. A high - quality patented rose seedling can cost up to 10 yuan. If 5,000 seedlings can be planted per mu, the initial investment will be 50,000 yuan - which can be regarded as an "entrance ticket".

The other is the commission paid based on sales revenue. At a rate of 10%, regardless of the market conditions, for every 10 flowers sold by flower farmers, the income from 1 flower has to be paid to overseas breeding companies - which can be understood as a "share fee".

In addition, for the first - generation patented varieties treated with biotechnology, the genetic advantages usually only last for one season. If flower farmers save seeds or propagate by cuttings on their own, the offspring will degenerate seriously and lose their commercial value completely - like an invisible technological lock. Therefore, after each production cycle, flower farmers need to buy a new batch of seedlings to "renew the license".

The mature business model of European breeding giants is based on hundreds of years of technological investment and commercial design.

Through capital - led R & D and global acquisitions, they first obtained the variety patents for 90% of the world's commercial flowers, making it difficult for other catch - up players to keep up. Then, through legislation and international treaties, they built an unbreakable industry moat for variety right protection, and finally constructed an impregnable wall closely woven by technology, business, and law.

According to public information, the accumulation of genetic resources by the Dutch can be traced back to the colonial era of the Dutch East India Company. During the global expansion in the 17th century, they took a large number of plant varieties from the Ottoman Empire, Africa, and Asia and established the Leiden Hortus Botanicus, the earliest plant research center in Europe, which laid the foundation for the rich variety of the "Flower Empire".

In the process, through a large number of variety improvements and intellectual property registrations, the Dutch turned the native genetic resources of many countries into "Dutch patents".

This also includes a large number of native Chinese varieties.

For example, in 2003, more than 10 varieties of peonies and tree peonies were exhibited at the Dutch Flower Expo. Their parent plants were all from the cross - breeding of the native Chinese species "Fengdanbai". Due to the failure to register with UPOV in time, China lost the sovereignty of these varieties.

Even the tulip, regarded as the "national flower of the Netherlands", has its original species from Tibet in China and Turkey. Now, the Dutch tulips have more than 3,000 hybrid branches, accounting for 65% of the global output. Whether it is China or Turkey, they need to pay the Dutch to plant these varieties.

This series of problems pose double challenges to Dounan: It is restricted in terms of varieties and has to bear the "entrance ticket" and "share fee" for a long time, which eats into its already limited profit margin.

Some "countermeasures" that emerged as a result have laid deeper hidden dangers for the long - term development of the Dounan market.

The cost of an imported patented seedling is 8 yuan, while the cost of self - propagation by cuttings is only 0.5 yuan. The huge cost difference led to the widespread "illegal propagation". Coupled with low infringement costs, difficult judicial identification, and long rights - protection cycles, China has long been regarded as a "high - risk market" internationally. The idea that "breeding is not as good as stealing seeds" has also seriously stifled the innovation enthusiasm of local enterprises.

Zhang Li, the former general manager of the flower auction center, once recalled that when the team visited Europe in the early days, "everyone was talking to us about intellectual property protection". Some breeding companies didn't even want to receive them when they heard they were from Yunnan.

The trust crisis once made local breeding companies refuse to export core varieties to China. As a result, Dounan could only stay in the low - and medium - end market for a long time. Around 2015, 90% of the roses planted by flower farmers were still eliminated European varieties whose patent periods had expired. They maintained their business by selling in large quantities at low prices.

All these are finally reflected in a comparison of numbers:

In 2024, Dounan achieved a transaction volume of 14.1 billion stems, creating a transaction value of 11.5 billion yuan. Its transaction volume has reached 70% of that of Aalsmeer in the Netherlands (20 billion stems), but the latter's transaction value of up to 47 billion yuan is more than four times that of Dounan.

The transaction volume exceeds 70%, but the price difference is four times. The huge gap in output value reveals their different positions in the global value chain:

Take roses, which are most dependent on Dutch imports, as an example. The average price of a rose in Dounan is 0.8 yuan. After deducting the patent fee, planting costs, losses, labor, and packaging, the final profit is only 0.3 yuan. In contrast, with just a piece of variety right, Dutch breeding companies can get a patent fee of 4.5 to 15 yuan per stem from the champion variety "Guns N' Roses" planted on a contract - manufacturing basis in Ecuador, for example - which is several times higher than the selling price of a single rose by Dounan's flower farmers.

That is to say, while Aalsmeer reaps huge profits at the top of the industrial chain with its patented technology, Dounan is still earning hard - earned money from contract - manufacturing - style cultivation, and even whether it can plant or not depends on others.

The rapid expansion of scale and the continuous predicament of germplasm resources form the sharpest contradiction on this industrial path.

Without breaking free from the shackles of the "share fee", it can only be trapped in the low - end of the industrial chain forever, and the goal of becoming the "world's number one" can never be achieved. A battle for the high - ground of germplasm resources has quietly begun.

03 The Difficult Breakthrough

To break the deadlock, one must change from passively following international rules in the past to thoroughly understanding and using these rules. The core of this is independent innovation.

After realizing the pain of the "germplasm resource predicament", a difficult breakthrough around the "Chinese core" of flowers has begun to unfold simultaneously in policies, the market, and laboratories.

Some breakthroughs have been made.

In 2018, a new generation of rose varieties, which took four years and more than one million yuan to develop by local breeder Duan Jinhui, was launched and promoted under his name. The roses, which embody the efforts of Chinese breeders, quickly covered an area of more than 1,000 mu in Yunnan, with an annual output of 50 million stems, bringing an annual patent income of nearly 2 million yuan.

Although this amount of money is not much, it symbolizes a breakthrough from zero to one - Chinese flower farmers are starting to pay for their own patents.

However, the road to innovation is not smooth, and Dounan's journey to break through is also advancing in the face of difficulties. In addition to the difficulties in variety R & D and cultivation itself, the protection of R & D achievements and enthusiasm is also a challenge.

In 2020, when Yang Yuyong, the breeder of the domestic star hydrangea variety "Boda Lan", finally obtained the new variety protection certificate after six years of cultivation and two years of patent application, the core seedlings were "illegally propagated" by unscrupulous nursery merchants. In just a few months, the counterfeit variety "Da Hai Lan" swept through Dounan, and the price war disrupted the market order. Yang Yuyong ended up with no income.

The individual struggles of practitioners and various historical problems have finally promoted the strategic awakening at the national level. To break the vicious circle and build an independent and controllable seed industry system, the sprint for the "Chinese core" has reached a turning point.

At the beginning of 2024, Chenggong District in Kunming set up a special fund of 2.2 billion yuan for the "Ten Measures for the Flower Industry". This policy precisely targets the core pain points of the industry: It provides heavy - handed support for breeding R & D, subsidies for applying for plant variety rights, legal support for rights protection, and also funds the overseas expansion of the "Yunnan Flowers" brand.

In the same year, the national standard "Specifications for the Circulation and Transaction of Main Fresh - Cut Flowers" was introduced. For the first time, it established a full - process standard for five major flower categories such as roses and lilies, from post - harvest treatment, grading, packaging to cold - chain transportation. This "Chinese standard" had an immediate effect. The price of the native A - grade variety "Dian Hong" roses increased due to its stable quality and low loss rate. More importantly, it began to attract Southeast Asian flowers to actively comply