Italian marketing and research organisation CSO has published its annual study of the commercial trade in fruit and vegetables between Italy and its largest fresh produce export market, Germany, revealing mixed fortunes for exporters of fruit and those selling vegetables to foreign markets.
Despite a 2 per cent increase in volume to 1.72m tonnes between the start of January and the end of September last year, Italy's fresh fruit exports suffered a dramatic fall in value, down 19 per cent at €1.35bn.
Shipments to Germany suffered an even sharper downturn, CSO reported, falling 5 per cent in volume terms and 26 per cent in value terms compared with the same period of 2008, to 527,851 tonnes and €426.5m.
Italy's citrus exports were the biggest casualty, according to the report; export volumes were 43 per cent lower in the first nine months of last year against the year-earlier period at 107,997 tonnes.
This was in line with a corresponding 42 per cent decrease in shipments to Germany, which took just 24,900 tonnes compared with 42,864 tonnes in the first nine months of 2008.
The country's citrus export sales were also down by 42 per cent at €79.9m, with export sales on the German market almost half what they were in January-September 2008 at €18.4m.
Italian exports of fresh vegetables (excluding potatoes) fared slightly better, even though volumes slipped by 10 per cent year-on-year to 536,585 tonnes during the first nine months of 2009.
Conversely, the value of those exports rose, by 4 per cent to €631.8m.
Germany's Italian vegetable import volume was also down during the period, by 9 per cent to around 206,000 tonnes.
But the value of those shipments was 8 per cent higher at €230.2m, CSO revealed.
A full report on Italy's fresh produce exports during 2008 and the first nine months of 2009 – including a special focus on Germany – is available from the CSO website.
