The Citrus Management Committee (CGC) met on Tuesday to assess the official citrus production prospects recently presented by the Regions of Valencia, Andalusia and Murcia (Catalonia, the fourth most important region in terms of production, has stopped doing this due to lack of budget) and analyse their impact on the development of the current season.
The first and most obvious conclusion is that the national tonnage to be marketed for fresh consumption will be significantly lower than estimated, mainly due to three factors: the lack of rainfall, which has resulted in smaller calibres and a lot of fruit failing to meet the necessary standards to be harvested; the thinnings, which were recommended in order to tackle the former issue, and the greater tonnage intended for juice processing compared to last season. The second conclusion, moreover, is that the mandarins and oranges available this campaign will be of exceptional quality, as shown by studies of the IVIA and Soivre on the balance between acidity and sugar, which also confirm their high juice content.
The CGC has warned that this season will be marked by the impact of drought after an exceptionally warm spring and summer, and an unprecedented lack of rainfall, which has caused a significant percentage of the harvest of oranges and mandarins to suffer (or have a high chance of suffering) serious problems to reach commercial sizes, thus causing their rejection by the retail industry. All in all, the national association clarifies that the overall result of such appraisals is no more than a return to a "normal" harvest, which will ensure a balanced supply to the markets and almost identical figures to those recorded in the final balance of the campaign two years ago (in the 2014/15 campaign), when the current problems arising from the lack of rainfall were not an issue.
In fact, the just over 7 million tonnes of citrus fruit estimated to be produced this season, differs by only 0.8% from the tonnage reached by the end of the marketing year 2014/15. But, in turn, it is 16.6% greater than that of the 2015/16 campaign. In this regard, both the CGC and the technicians of the three departments of Agriculture, who have made the harvest forecasts, agree that the last two seasons "are not comparable," because both have been "exceptional" due to very different factors. While the last season was marked by the impact of strong west winds at the end of May 2015, which led to a drastic reduction of the production, this campaign will be defined by the drought conditions recorded across the Mediterranean area, which has affected the size of a great share of mandarins and oranges.
Moreover, the regional estimates were carried out in July and August and it was precisely during these months that many producers decided to do the thinnings in order to reduce the share of small fruits and improve the quality of those left in the tree. Incidentally, the CGC believes that this practice was rightly recommended by the technicians of the Valencian Council of Agriculture during the presentation of the production prospects, as the best formula to mitigate the aforementioned problems with the calibres, before the start of the upcoming mandarin and orange campaigns.
Furthermore, as openly admitted by the governments of Andalusia and the Region of Valencia, there will have to be a compulsory review of the current acreage planted with citrus fruits, as it seems to differ greatly
from that officially declared.
The Spanish citrus industry has gone from the boom of new plantations experienced in the decade between the 1995/96 and 2005/06 campaigns, when the annual purchase of seedlings stood at 6.6 million, to a very different situation in the next eight years, with seedling acquisitions totalling only 3.5 million per year; figures which barely guarantee the replacement of older trees and which also illustrate the abandonment of plantations or the switch to other, more profitable crops; a trend that has consolidated over the last five years.