“It's been a challenging apple season in Brazil,” said Pierre Nicolas Peres of Fraiburgo SC. “We have less fruit this year.” He pointed to sustained high temperatures as one of the reasons for lower productivity this year. While hot weather is expected during the summer months, Peres explained that they had three weeks of consistently high temperatures that affected this year's fruit volume. Water shortages also made for smaller sizes and shortened the harvesting period. Those factors resulted in less fruit and smaller sizes, making a large portion of this year's crop unfit for export.“We can't export fruit that's not at the right point of maturation,” said Peres. “So we don't have a lot of fruit for export right now.” While apple exports from Brazil reached 95,000 tons last year, Peres estimated that this year's exports will likely finish at around 40 percent of that mark. Though he hopes for increased production next year, he also noted that increased acreage is unlikely to happen in the next few years. Productivity has also been affected by hail and frost damage in the last three years, and combined with strong domestic demand, the export market will probably not see a large increase of Brazilian apples.
“We have about a million new consumers every year and consumer income is rising every year, so there are always more consumers and those consumers are buying more,” said Peres. “So even if we produce more, we have a market to sell what we grow.” Due to the latitude of growing regions, Brazilian apple orchards get fewer hours of sunlight per season than orchards in Europe, resulting in smaller fruit that does not meet export standards, and with a market for that small fruit in Brazil, there's even more pressure funnelling apples to the domestic market.
“We have to supply the supermarkets here all year round,” said Peres. “We also have a good market for kids, where we can sell our smaller sizes. We have a huge market for smaller apples there.”
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or more information:Pierre Nicolas Pérès
Brazil
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