Why £15 durians are being sold at half price - or given away for free
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Image source, Kelly Ng/ BBCByKoh Ewe and Kelly Ng, Reporting fromSingaporePublished1 hour agoFor days now, a long line has been snaking around the two blocks leading up to the Durian Ninja fruit stall in Tampines, a busy township in the east of Singapore.
They are waiting patiently for the free fruit the seller has been giving away daily since mid-June: two durians per customer, about 600kg a day. This generosity is being fuelled by an oversupply of durian across the border in Malaysia, which typically produces about 550,000 tonnes a year. But an unusually abundant 2026 has crashed the price of the prickly, pungent fruit beloved in large parts of Asia.
Sixty-nine year-old Cherng, who is in the line in Singapore, tells the BBC that he has been having durian "almost every day". For him and his family, this is a rare chance to devour durians "of good quality, and sometimes at nearly half the price of previous seasons". Customers in Malaysia and neighbouring Singapore are swarming fruit stalls where durians are being sold at huge discounts or, if they are lucky, given away for free.
But while durian lovers feast, Malaysian farmers are chagrined. They say this glut, or what many have dubbed a "durian tsunami", is the result of a decade-long boom, during which Malaysians flocked to durian farming to cash in on growing Chinese demand. Image source, Kelly Ng/ BBC"Back then, a lot of people cut down their rubber trees or oil palms to grow durians.
A lot of the trees [planted then] are now starting to bear fruit," says Lu Yuee Thing, the owner of several durian farms near the Malaysian town of Raub.
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