For years, China has been one of the world’s largest suppliers of a rare delicacy — the matsutake mushroom. But this year, a prolonged drought and heat waves across the country’s south have slashed the harvest and sent prices skyrocketing.

Matsutake — “pine mushroom” in Japanese — are prized in many other Asian countries for their scarcity and distinct spicy flavor, which comes with a tinge of cinnamon and cypress. They are often served grilled and in rice and soups. Japan, the world’s largest consumer of the matsutake, reserves almost all domestic harvest for its own consumption and imports a large haul from China, according to Japan’s Agriculture Ministry. Middle-class Chinese consumers are also increasingly acquiring a taste for the mushroom.

Mushroom traders expected matsutake prices to start dropping around late August, when large quantities of lesser-quality mushrooms hit the market. But this has not happened. Instead, some production bases in Yunnan — the southwestern Chinese province that makes up a third of China’s matsutake output and about 70 percent of exports — have seen the harvest drop by up to 90 percent this year, local officials told the Chinese financial outlet Caixin.

Higher wholesale prices in China, coupled with logistics disruptions caused by the coronavirus and escalating tensions in the Taiwan Strait, are driving up the cost of matsutake mushrooms at the dining table. At the Mushuihua mushroom market in Kunming, the capital of China’s Yunnan province, the matsutake is sold for about $70 a pound — still much cheaper than most Japanese varieties, though prices have doubled in the past 12 months.

“The harvest last year was already low, but this year, it is significantly lower,” said Zhao Jiuen, a mushroom wholesaler in Diqing, a mountainous region in Yunnan.

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