Live streams have helped Xuwen pineapple planters overcome slow sales caused by the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) epidemic.

Xuwen county in Zhanjiang, South China's Guangdong province is known as "the Sea of Pineapples," which means the "the Baltic Sea" in Chinese, referring not to the Baltic Sea in Europe but to the vast pineapple plantations in the county. Xuwen has a very large area of pineapple plantations, in which one out of every three pineapples on the national market comes from here.

Due to the outbreak of COVID-19 in early January, a batch of ripe pineapples faced sales difficulties. In order to solve the problem and help growers, the county head of Xuwen started selling pineapples on e-commerce platform Pinduoduo, a site that focuses on group buying and bulk sales, through live streams. 

Wu Kangxiu, head of Xuwen, became an instant hit and sold 300,000 tons of pineapples in two hours. Following that success, several government leaders and large-scale farmers were mobilized to conduct live streaming, with the products sold expanded to include corn and chives.

The hot sales of the agricultural products, especially the pineapples, are based on measures taken by the Xuwen government in recent years to develop its pineapple industry and improve the pineapples' quality.

Xuwen county started developing diversified products three years ago and has introduced and promoted nine new varieties. It has developed multiple big data platforms to provide information like pineapple plantation volume, real-time listing volume for farmers, as well as purchase and sales needs to help growers produce and sell their products. In addition, Xuwen has strengthened the pineapple industry chain, improving pineapple processing capacity, developing new products like pineapple wine and pineapple cake, as well as establishing agricultural tourism resorts.