After overtaking Almeria and Alicante and having taken most of the market in recent years, the producers of seedless table grapes from the Region of Murcia, which used to have 2,000 productive hectares and currently have 6,000 hectares, have become the leading producers of table grapes in Spain. The region produces 80% of the seedless grapes exported to Europe.
On Monday, the ITUM- Table Grape Research and Technology Company, in which grape producers are involved, and Murcia's Agricultural and Food Development Research Institute (IMIDA), signed a work agreement for the next four years that involves an investment of almost 2 million Euro, more than half of which will be contributed by the business sector.
The collaboration between researchers and farmers dates back to 2002 and since then they have managed to register and place 14 new varieties of seedless table grapes (7 white ones, 6 red ones, and 1 black variety) in the market, two of which were recently placed.
Esther Gomez, CEO of Itum, said she was very satisfied with the collaboration between researchers and the business sector and that the new grapes were native varieties that were adapted to the region's climate so they no longer had to pay royalty for using foreign patents.
Gomez said that although they were satisfied with their product's presence in the foreign market, they still had to become well known in the domestic market. She also stated that future research should centre on extra-early and late varieties, so they could have production throughout the year and stop importing from South America. Currently, the campaign begins in mid-June and ends in October.
Adrian Martinez, director of IMIDA, stated that their next goal was to create varieties that were resistant to viruses, could produce until the end of the year, and had new flavours. "We already have mango flavoured, muscatel flavoured and cotton candy flavoured varieties," he said.
The Minister of Agriculture, Antonio Cerda, said that this was one of the four largest table grape breeding programs in the world and that it had achieved increasing its hybrid creation from 1,500 hybrids a year to more than 10,000 hybrids in recent years. "We must continue researching to fill the gaps in the market," he concluded.
The seedless grape is currently being exported to Europe, South Africa, Australia, Peru, Chile, and Brazil, among others, and there have been recent attempts to enter the Chinese market.
Source: laopiniondemurcia.es