China hosts the 'the Olympics of figs' in Sichuan

Participants were impressed with how attentively Moshe Flaishman, a fig expert from Israel, would examine a fig tree during the ongoing 2023 World Fig Conference and Expo held in Weiyuan county, Sichuan province between Tuesday and Friday.

"I see whether it is growing well and what suggestion I can make," said Flaishman.

The conference, held every four years, is hailed as the Olympics of the fig industry. It has been held in Türkiye, Spain, Portugal, Morocco and Croatia.

The current conference marks the first time that the event, hosted by the International Society for Horticulture Science, is being staged in China.

Weiyuan has a long history of fig cultivation. More than 100 years ago, fig trees were grown sporadically throughout the county.

In the 1980s, local farmers began to expand the cultivation of fig trees, and figs gradually shifted from self-consumption to the market.

Today, Weiyuan has the only fig park in Sichuan and is one of China's three major fig producers. Its fig tree planting area registers 3,467 hectares, accounting for 15.7 percent of China's total and ranking first in the country's fig production.

At present, the global area of fig farms is about 313,000 hectares, with Mediterranean countries accounting for roughly 60 percent of the total. China's now accounts for about 23,333 hectares, ranking seventh in the world, according to Song Huigang, executive president of the China Cash Forest Association.

Weiyuan in Sichuan, Kashgar in the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region and Weihai in Shandong province are the most representative of China's fig industry, Song said.

You Yong, a native of Weiyuan, started planting fig trees in 2002 and now owns the largest fig base in the county.

Visiting an exhibition hall at his base on Wednesday, Professor U. Aksoy from the Department of Fruit Trees, Ismail University in Türkiye, was pleasantly surprised to see that a fig leaf she sent to You Yong in 2015 is displayed in the hall. When she was told that the Chinese characters below the leaf read that their friendship formed over a fig will long endure, Aksoy, who has studied figs for four decades, had a broad smile.