Melon prices have been running higher as Latin American supplies have wound down and Spanish growers announce a 10 per cent reduction in plantings.
Said one UK importer: “Spanish supplies are only just getting turned on now, a couple of weeks later than usual. The weather in Spain has pushed the start back a bit and supplies from Brazil, Honduras, Panama and Costa Rica have finished on the early side, so that has pushed prices up.”
The same importer reports that Galia is in particularly tight supply, as well as watermelons, while other traders have been seeing yellow prices climb.
Laureano Montesinos, president of the melon and watermelon sector at Murcia producer-exporters’ association Proexport, said: “In Murcia, we are forecasting a reduction in planted area for melons and watermelons of 10 per cent compared to last year.”
The main reason is the pressure that suppliers are under from their supermarket customers as they try to maintain profit margins while production costs increase.
Montesinos said: “The whole of the region of Murcia is reducing the acreage dedicated to melon production because the retail chains are not paying what is necessary to maintain production. We have been through several seasons of bad returns and the supermarkets simply should not be paying producers below their cost price.”
At a meeting last week of the Proexport melon sector, Montesinos made an appeal to retailers to improve the terms of their commercial agreements and try to reduce the margins they are trying to achieve on the product. He warned that if they did not, they could be engendering the disappearance of melon production.
Producer-exporters also complained that in the UK, importers continue to be exceptionally demanding, despite the weakness of sterling against the euro.
“They are demanding the same quality that they have always required in the UK market but for a lower price,” said one sender. “This comes on top of the depreciation of sterling, all of which means that customers and their suppliers are going through a period of readaptation in the UK.”
