Belize, of course, is not alone in predicting a volume increase and this does not bode well for the prices on the world processing market.
With the expectation that there will be a lot of fruit on the market this year, prices have been disappointingly low. Citrus Growers’ Association (CGA) chief executive officer Bridget Cullerton said: “Just to give you an idea of the impact on prices, in 2002 in mid-October citrus “futures” was quoted at US$0.90 a pound solid. On October 16, 2003 the futures price quoted on the world market was US$0.69 a pound solid, which is a significant decrease.”
This year’s forecast marks the fifth national citrus production forecast being issued to the industry by CGA. Once again we have been able to use an objective method to collect the fruit production data for orange. To complete the objective forecast for orange, CREI in collaboration with the CPBL, which funded the project, coordinated the collection of fruit count data from 1,600 trees, randomly selected from throughout the industry. The subjective forecast for grapefruit was based on the grapefruit production trend of the last 10 years and a telephone poll to obtain individual estimates of the largest grapefruit growers in the industry.
The Citrus Products Belize Ltd (CPBL) factory opened this season on October 29, 2003 and the CGA is attempting to take the country’;s citrus industry onto another plane, advising growers to test fruit before harvest and obtain a fruit license from CGA before delivering that fruit to the factory.
The objective fruit count carried out showed that the mean fruit produced from each tree for the industry this year (2003-2004) is 235, an increase from the 2001-2002 crop year (an objective fruit count was not carried out in 2002-2003) with a mean fruit from each tree of 176. The former figure translates to an estimate of 5.12m boxes of orange to be produced this crop year.
The subjective estimates for grapefruit show that 1.27m boxes of grapefruit are expected to be produced this year. Therefore a total of 6.39m boxes of fruit are expected to be produced for the 2003-2004 crop year, an overall increase of 18.5 per cent on the total production for 2002-2003.
CPBL has been made aware that in previous years the average fruit delivered to the factories has been 97.3 per cent of the total fruit produced by the industry with 1.8 per cent of this being rejected by the factories. Therefore an average of 95.5 per cent of the total fruit produced is actually processed by the factories.
“We would like to thank all growers who participated in the survey carried out by the fruit logistics team of the Citrus Products of Belize Ltd. Without your input and assistance producing this year’s forecast would not have been possible,” said Cullerton.
No comments yet