For Chinese consumers, it was a blueberry bonanza. Prices dropped so low—often $3 or less for a 9-ounce container—that state media trumpeted an era of “blueberry freedom,” in which even ordinary people can gorge on a once-exotic fruit.

For just about everyone in the blueberry business, though, it has been a knife fight, plagued by intellectual-property theft and tanking profits.

A healthy nutritious food is now cheap and widely available, but at what cost?? $3 or less apparently

Driscoll’s has filed more than 20 lawsuits against companies in China, some of which it has said took its proprietary blueberry plants, propagated them and sold them to rival growers. Some Western fruit companies worked with private investigators who went undercover at plant nurseries, posing as traders or farmers so they could buy plants and hustle them off to labs for DNA testing to prove they were pirated.