The South American cherry season is running late by up to two weeks, but prospects for the whole season are promising.
“The season is running a bit late out of both Chile and Argentina as the cold snap in August affected both countries,” said Matt Hancock of Norton Folgate Marketing Ltd. “We are now getting into a decent supply situation and that will steadily increase over the next 10 days. We expect that once we get into mid-December, we will have a quite a big crop to go at.”
New plantings in the central valley - the main Chilean production region which runs form Santiago to Curico - are starting to come on stream this season, which is providing extra volume.
There are also increases in Argentina, although Hancock reports that in Mendoza, where up to 70 per cent of the country’s cherries are grown, producers have been struggling a little on fruit size and volume following the inclement weather. New plantings in Argentina have been going in in the Patagonia area, which supplies late fruit to the marketplace in February. “There was a frost there only about a week ago and that is likely to have affected some of the late season fruit,” said Hancock. “But by and large we are looking at a positive season.”
And in Chile, recent press reports suggest that growers are increasingly seeing cherries as the new star performer in their export basket, with the potential to have a similar impact on global markets as berries have done to date.
According to official figures, Chile produces just two per cent of the world’s cherry volume, but is the southern hemisphere’s largest exporter of the fruit accounting for 70 per cent of its sendings. Last season, exports were up 14 per cent on 2005-06 to 24,000 tonnes and this season the expectation is that they will climb to 30,664t and reach 42,339t by 2013.
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