Low papaya volumes push up prices in South Africa

South African papaya supplies are low at the moment, as the peak winter season is due to start May/June, and consumers pay about R20 (€1.39) for a fruit. Growers are saying that they are seeing the lowest production volumes for April they’ve ever seen, which might be due to the drought and perhaps a shift in the production cycle.

“We get very good prices on the markets but we have little to send,” Riaan Kotze of HAK tells FreshPlaza.

At the moment growers report a good crop, still green on the trees. In four to six weeks’ time large volumes will come onto the market, possibly resulting in a bottleneck of supply as it’ll be wintertime by then, a time when consumers don’t eat as much papaya.

The papaya is a tropical fruit, grown under subtropical conditions in South Africa, and for that reason supply is cyclical, with the highest volumes of large fruit available during winter and smaller fruit resulting from winter growth, available during summertime.

The effect of the drought is still evident in some areas. Riaan Kotze says that for six months last year their farm, situated in the Mpumalanga Onderberg area, functioned on merely 5% of its usual water allocation.

Neofresh (which merged with large papaya producer Low’s Creek in 2011) is the largest papaya producer for the South African market and has started receiving the first papayas from its Mozambican outgrower. Mozambique has been similarly affected by drought but they are slightly better off because they are based on the Nkomati river that is a combination of the Crocodile and Komati rivers.

Its production is based primarily on its own two hybrids Papino® and Neo-Essence® which have the advantage of a better shelf life, facilitating Neofresh’s papaya exports by air freight to, at this point in time, the Middle East and the UK. Their export campaign runs 52 weeks of the year. At the moment Neofresh’s total annual volume is 15,000 to 16,000 tonnes, but Lean van Schalkwyk, marketing manager of Neofresh, says that they hope to up that to 17,000 tonnes in 2018 with the Mozambican out grower contribution.

Another large-scale producer is HAK of a number of cultivars like Thainung 1 and 2, Solo and Selection 42; the former useful on heavier soils with its higher resistance to root rot. It has large fruit suitable for the marketing of loose fruit, while Solo and Selection 42’s smaller fruits lend itself to punnet packaging. According to Riaan Kotze of HAK, they market all their fruits on the fresh produce markets. “I’m a big proponent of the open market system and I think the more of the large role-players there are on the market, the better for the system. At the moment you’re seeing that supermarket groups, who normally get their fruit directly, have to go to the markets for papayas because the volumes are so low. The moment the large role-players return to the market, there’s an upward trend in prices.”

The Rodney Cooper Estates’ papayas are marketed mostly (85%) to supermarkets in the Western Cape as well as in the Eastern Cape, KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng, with the balance sent to the fresh produce markets. Rodney Cooper says that he has tried many cultivars over the years but has found Thainung 2 most to his satisfaction regarding yield and quality. He follows a short cycle in his orchards – every four years the trees are replaced, so that they never reach a height that necessitates increased labour costs during harvesting. For this reason, too, hail netting is not practical, although his farm, also in the Tzaneen area, has never been particularly affected by it.

Not so thirty kilometres eastwards on the farm AAL Boerdery of André Lategan: “Last year as we were just about to thin out the seedlings (we select quite rigorously for hermaphrodite plants for their thick flesh and smaller seed cavity) we got the heavy hail that also badly affected the mango industry, and about 80% of the seedlings lost their top growth. The regrowth set us back about five months in the production cycle.” Among the cultivars he grows, is a closed cultivar developed by Dr Aart Louw, a papaya expert formerly attached to the Agricultural Research Council (ARC) and now to Neofresh.

The South African papaya industry is a small industry without an umbrella growers’ association, a fact bemoaned by some of the growers FreshPlaza spoke to. “There are no papaya specialists at the ARC now that Dr Aart Louw has left so there’s no industry research being undertaken,” according to one grower.

For more information:

Riaan Kotze

HAK

Tel: +27 82 948 2257

Email: hak.riaan@gmail.com

Lean van Schalkwyk

Neofresh

Tel: +27 82 440 2951

Email: lean.van.schalkwyk@neofresh.net

http://neofresh.net/

Rodney Cooper

Rodney Cooper Estates