At an end-of-season conference organised by grower-exporter association Freshuelva, the sector heard how important it was to diversify production in the Huelva area away from reliance on Glen Lyon and also reduce acreage so that next season does not close with the negative balance forecast for the 2006-07 campaign.
Some growers in the El Condado area of Huelva have already reached agreement to reduce their planting next season to avoid market saturation. And others are planting to supply the shoulders of the season, rather than the peak.
This is the first season that profitability among Spanish raspberry growers has been under serious threat since producers started to plant the berry as a means of diversifying out of strawberry production at the end of the 1990s. But costs of production are triple those of strawberries, and some growers have struggled to make their crops pay at the height of the season as prices have fallen.
Raspberry plantations have increased by 60 per cent since 2004 to reach 1,200 hectares in 2007 - a 41 per cent rise on acreage in 2006. Freshuelva president Jose Manuel Romero described the season as “so-so”, due to the decline in prices on last year by 25 per cent.
He said he hoped that given this “negative result”, growers would adopt the right approach next season. “It is not advantageous to continue to increase raspberry area and production levels when it is already difficult to market the whole crop in Europe,” he warned.
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