AROMATIC PLANT RESEARCH AND PRODUCTION IN YUNNAN

The regions where essential oils are predominately produced are in the southern part of China, including the provinces of Yunnan, Fujian, Guangtong, Guangxi, Sichuang, Zhejiang and Jiangshu. These provinces can be divided into two parts according to the geographic situation. Yunnan, Guangtong and Guangxi have a lot of tropical and subtropical zones. In contrast, the others have only a subtropical and moderate climate. This is the reason for the first region to be the source of essential oils as Ylang ylang, vetiver, eucalyptus, jasmine, lemongrass, sassafras and Star aniseed. The second region provides the oils of peppermint, spearmint and osmanthus.

The annual production of essential oil, concrete and absolutes from Chinon is listed in Table 1. It must be noted these outputs are the average of the ten years, because the production of natural aromatic plants is always influenced by weather and demand, and thus fluctuates. The table shows that China has many potential possibilities for production of essential oils, absolutes and concretes.

As for technologies used in the annual production of Chinese essential oils, much equipment has been introduced from Europe and United States. Much laboratory apparatus, including gas chromatographs, Gas Chromatograph/Mass Spectroscopy, Gas Chromatograph/Foulier Transform Infrared, High Performance Liquid Chromatograph, Nuclear Magnetic Resonance were purchased from Hewlett Packard, Shimazhu, Perkin-Elmer and Finigan. All these instruments have played an important role in the improvement of oil production and the establishment of quality control measures.

The agronomic technique is more important by comparison with that of extraction and distillation. China is a country of agriculture, 90% of population are farmers. The Chinese government always emphasizes the importance of application of biotechnology and improvement of quality of products of agriculture. Now, the culture in vitro of vanilla has been successfully achieved and the propagation on a large scale has occurred in the Yunnan Province.

Our major problem facing the development of our essential oil industry relate to our ancient economic system relative to that of the free market. In addition, information on supply and demand are not always available. This makes it difficult for the farmer to

Download Adobe Acrobat Reader (free software to read PDF files)