THE CONFERENCE PROCEEDINGS - IFEAT

ANETHOLE DEVELOPMENT TRENDSNow people's endless demand for resources has already seriously threatened the natural world. Allkinds of pollution, such as water, soil, atmosphere, foods and so on, are more and more serious. Lotsof disasters occur sequentially or simultaneously, for instance, drought, floods, mud-rock flow, ortyphoons. All these disasters threaten production and lives of human beings. Now that people areaware of this, they have to reduce demand and emissions, produce cleanly, cherish the environmentand protect the earth. So the development of anethole will be affected by these general trends in thefuture. Whether each type of anethole can survive will be decided by the competitive power of cost,stability of price, reliability of supply and adaptability to the environment.Natural anetholeThe price of natural anethole is decided by the weather and production costs. Production and lives ofhuman beings generate a great volume of greenhouse gases, the pollution of air, water and soil risesand the natural disasters, drought, floods and extremes of cold happen constantly. All these factorsthreaten the existence and welfare of human beings. The output and price of many plants fluctuatesgreatly with the weather.With living standards increasing, the costs of production and living are gradually going up. The pricesof all kinds of means of production and subsistence, especially farm produce, are rising rapidly.Conversely, it also increases production costs. For example, the daily wage of a construction worker inwestern China was about 40~50 ¥ in 2005, but it went up to 100~120 ¥ in 2011. In the same years, theprice of rice was 2.0~2.4 ¥/kg, then reached 4.2~4.8 ¥/kg.Table 4 Anise oil exports 2001-2011Year 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011Quantity(tons)593.4 646.5 535.1 624.5 539.8 618.0 644.5 482.3 808.6 569.0 817.0Price(USD/kg6.69 5.74 5.58 5.75 6.26 6.93 6.64 8.68 8.70 17.0 21.6Generally, it is the weather that causes changes in supply that then affects the price of naturalproducts. However, these natural product prices, including natural flavours, are all going up year byyear globally. The key factor is increasing production costs. Anethole and eucalyptus oils are typicalcases. Let us look at the price of anethole from 2001 in Table 4. The average price in 2011 is morethan three times that in 2001.The price of natural anethole increases gradually, with both the exportquantity and the price at their highest in 2011, at 817 tons and 21.6 USD/kg respectively. So theincreasing production cost is the main factor pushing the price of anethole up.From Table 4, we can see that the change in the exported quantity of anise oil is not great. But the datacannot simply reflect the real output of Chinese anise oil. China exported hardly any fresh star aniseoil after 1990, and almost all the anise oil exported is after separation. But there are different customstax regulations for anethole and anise oil in China, with anethole classified as an oxygen compound.So it is very difficult to estimate the real output of anethole. In the anethole trade, the ratio of anetholeand anise oil is calculated as 7:3. For example, 817 tons of anise oil was exported in 2011, so the108