Asia’s fruit wars: The secretive world of plant invention and seed smuggling

By Jessie Yeung, Junko Ogura, and Mirai Katagiri, CNN

Tokyo (CNN) — The fruit hanging on the branch looks tantalizingly good – round and plump, with a fragrant, deep orange skin.

But this isn’t just any fruit. The Beni Princess is a prized citrus with a signature jelly-like texture and sweet juice that took 20 years to develop by crossbreeding two elite varieties.

Creating new varieties of fruit is a lucrative business, and Japan’s luxury cultivars often command whopping prices. So when Ehime prefecture in the country’s southwest proudly unveiled the Beni Princess last year, orchardists saw opportunity.

On their five-acre family farm, Ryohei Mori and his wife Kyeong-hui Choi had around 200 trees of another citrus variety ripped up so they could plant the Beni Princess –– even taking out a loan to build new facilities.

“It costs an absolute fortune at first. Buying the saplings, building the greenhouses, and everything,” Mori said.

The return may be worth the investment when they begin selling the first batches next spring. The only problem? Chinese farmers might beat them to it – and without permission, according to Japanese media reports.

Choi said she was appalled at the prospect the fruit might have been “stolen,” but said she was resigned to the fact there was nothing they could do besides hope that Japan’s government might act.

It can take years of tedious research and testing to develop new crops –– to ensure not only that they taste good, but also that they can grow at scale. The development costs can be eye-watering.

Just like other types of intellectual property (IP), fruit varieties can be proprietary and protected by law. But while you can report copyright infringement for a movie or a song, it’s much harder to prevent people from taking and planting seeds.

That has spawned a shadow war involving seed espionage and sapling smuggling across Asia – which experts say not only hurts farmers and breeders, but also stymies much-needed innovation as climate change threatens food security.

The Beni Princess appears to have been the latest target, with reports that seedlings are being sold on Chinese e-commerce sites – while its application for IP protection is still pending.

CNN couldn’t independently verify the claims, but the speculation prompted a plea from Ehime’s governor for Tokyo to investigate. Norikazu Suzuki, Japan’s agriculture minister, has called the issue “particularly serious.”

A major fruit innovator, Japan has been burned before by seed copycats. After it debuted the Shine Muscat grape in the early 2000s, Japan naively failed to register the fruit – highly coveted for its floral scent and juiciness – for protection in overseas markets. A deadline passed, then it was too late; now, Chinese and South Korean farms grow and sell the Shine Muscat in huge quantities and at a steep discount.

The price difference is evident during a quick stop at Hong Kong supermarkets – with Chinese Shine Muscats selling at 1/20th the cost of their Japanese equivalent. Suzuki estimated that Japan misses out on 20 billion yen ($126.9 million) every year in lost royalties due to the licensing mistake.

The lost revenue is a concern for Shinya Sato, a grower in Japan’s central Yamanashi prefecture who depends on Shine Muscats and other grape varieties for his livelihood. “I want people to enjoy eating what I grow, and I want to be fairly compensated for my labor,” he said.

“Everyone works hard to build up that value and make something delicious.”

How do you steal a seed?

There’s no simple way to protect a plant variety across borders.

Protection laws vary by country – for instance, a breeder in Japan who wants to prevent their unique variety from being copied in China or South Korea would need to apply for protection separately in those countries. And what legally counts as infringement in one country might not count in another.

But several governments across Asia have tightened their regulations in recent years, making it easier for breeders to protect their varieties, said David Jefferson, an associate professor at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand who specializes in environmental and intellectual property law.

China has strengthened its seed protection laws several times in the last few years; similarly, Japan passed new legislation in July to prevent the illicit export of homegrown varieties. And increasingly, Jefferson said, countries are adjusting their laws to move closer to a global standard set by the International Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants (UPOV), which has 80 member states.

But UPOV is not an enforcement agency. So when a plant gets stolen, smuggled out of the country, and grown elsewhere without permission, it’s up to the breeder to stop it – by proving through genetic testing that the replicated fruit in question is the proprietary variety, and going to law enforcement.

That’s a daunting task for smaller institutions like university research labs or think tanks that lack the resources to track down seed smugglers and prove their case. But large multinational companies, whose original varieties are fiercely protected, have had some success.

In 2011, Iowa farmers found a Chinese national on his knees in a cornfield, digging through the soil. He fled, and the ensuing FBI investigation unraveled a long-running conspiracy to steal genetically modified corn seeds and ship them to China.

The thief, Mo Hailong, was sentenced in 2016 to 36 months in prison for conspiracy to steal trade secrets from DuPont Pioneer and Monsanto, two of the world’s largest seed companies at the time. He was scheduled to be deported after being released.

That same year, the world’s biggest seller of kiwifruit, New Zealand-based Zespri, hired private investigators to dig into rumors that its Sungold variety was being illegally grown and sold in China.

This was a big deal; years earlier, Zespri had specifically created the sweeter golden kiwifruit to be resistant to a disease that had ravaged kiwifruit orchards around the world. The new variety helped the industry recover from the disease, and was a windfall for Zespri, which registered the fruit as its exclusive property in many countries including China.

The smuggler, Chinese national Gao Haoyu, owned a Sungold orchard in New Zealand and was licensed to grow and sell the variety there – but he secretly took young branches to China and sold them to farmers there. Before long, the Sungold variety had been illegally planted on more than 200 hectares in Hubei province and sold online.

After a protracted legal battle, a New Zealand court ordered Gao to pay Zespri $8.8 million in damages in 2020. And last year, a Chinese court ordered him to remove all Sungold orchards in China and to pay Zespri nearly $780,000.

CNN attempted to contact Gao through the last publicly available email and phone number associated with his New Zealand business. We did not hear back. But, in interviews with Chinese media, he has claimed that his motives were altruistic.

“99% of kiwifruit growers in China support me,” he told Chinese outlet Caixin in 2021. “I just wanted to contribute to the Chinese people by bringing the varieties over for everyone to grow, but I never made money from the varieties.”

What’s at stake?

Gao isn’t the only one who’s made this argument. Mo, the corn seed thief, also argued that corn was a public good, according to “The Scientist and the Spy,” a book by journalist Mara Hvistendahl on the case.

Other critics argue that food shouldn’t be controlled by large agricultural corporations, and that plant variety protection laws disempower local and indigenous communities.

Jefferson, the professor, acknowledged these real concerns, especially among developing nations in South and Southeast Asia, and Sub-Saharan Africa.

But, he said, under most laws, breeders have to be able to prove that their creations are new and improved in some way to be registered for protection. And, he said, these laws are necessary because the unauthorized spread of newly developed varieties can cause widespread harm.

For one, it drives down the overall price of the crop. Take Shine Muscat grapes: “Once known to be one of the prized varieties, it now produces nothing for farmers,” said Minori Hagiwara, who chairs a UPOV subcommittee and works in Japan’s Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries.

These premium fruits also often require methodical techniques to ensure their signature characteristics, like the precise amount of sunlight or the timing of pruning. But illicit growers are likely to churn out lower-quality fruit sold under the same name. “It really doesn’t reward the farmers who put in effort,” Hagiwara said.

It’s not just growers at risk from seed smuggling; when original varieties are protected and licensed, it creates a whole supply chain of exporters and distributors who are all impacted by illicit distribution.

The broader concern, though, is stifling innovation. When there’s rampant stealing of new varieties, countries will invest less in research and development because there’s no guarantee they’ll earn it back. Japan, for instance, is targeted heavily in fruit theft because it produces so many “premium” products – and it’s now spending less each year creating new varieties, potentially threatening its competitive edge in the market, Hagiwara said.

Climate change raises the stakes –– with yields of some traditional staple crops, like rice, already plummeting in places like Vietnam and Thailand. Crop innovation is seen as critical to guaranteeing long-term food supplies.

Vietnam, a UPOV member, has enthusiastically invested in creating new, resilient rice varieties –– and their yield has begun to increase in recent years, Hagiwara said. Meanwhile neighboring Thailand, with weaker variety protection laws, continues to see yields tank.

One of UPOV’s key goals is to create a universal patent, so that with one application, a breeder can get worldwide protection, she added. But it’s still a far-off dream.

In the meantime, farmers do their best to beef up security – hyperaware that all someone needs to do is cut off a branch from their trees for it to be smuggled away, draining their profits from some distant orchard in another country.

Sato, the Shine Muscat grape grower, said when his father owned the farm, there were no security measures. Now, he keeps defensive netting around his vines during harvest season to deter thieves.

But he can only do so much.

“There’s stealing directly from the field, but there’s also stealing our brand value, taking it and pretending they built it themselves,” he said.

The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2026 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.

Shuai Zhang contributed reporting.