Spanish citrus supplies have now moved into Clemenules on easy peelers and Navelina on oranges as picking resumed last week following rainfall at the end of October. Supplies of satsumas and Marisol have come to an end reports grower representative body Ava-Asaja. "With Clemenules and Navelina the season is now really getting going," said the association's Juan Salvador Torres. "Parts of Valencia had rain for between seven and 15 days at the end of October but the early varieties that might have been susceptible to the rain had already reached maturity and did not suffer any deterioration."
However, official estimates of a five per cent increase in exports released by the Valencia regional executive may be over optimistic, according to Ava-Asaja. "Once you take lemons out of the equation, the forecast increase is just one per cent making it very similar in tonnage to last year," said Torres. "So I doubt we will export much more." Also availability of Clemenvilla and Fortuna is down as 2003 appears to be a low volume year for the hybrids.
But what has changed on last season is that there is better distribution of varieties throughout the season so far without any overlap in harvesting dates. "This has brought greater calm to the campaign and there is not much of a sense of haste as there was last year," said Torres.
Growers are also pleased with the more reasonable prices they are achieving at this point in the season and Torres attributes this to greater certainty surrounding the US market for clems than at this time last year.
