This season (August 2018 / January 2019), Peru could export up to 121,500 tons of sweet onions (4,500 containers of 27 tons each), i.e. 4.6% more than the 116,100 tons (4,300 containers) it shipped out in the previous campaign.
This was reported by the CEO of KeyPeru, Miguel Ognio, who said that this increase was due to the good production registered in the main producing areas, such as Ica and the small north of Lima, which had a high quality. However, he said, the cold is delaying the production. According to estimates, about 2,500 hectares of sweet onion were installed for this campaign.
80% of sweet onion exports go to the United States, 18% to Europe (Spain and the Netherlands), which has just begun to know the advantages of a soft-flavored onion, and the rest to neighboring markets, such as Ecuador, Colombia, Chile, and Bolivia, which request it when there is a shortage in their internal production.
Miguel Ognio also said that KeyPeru expected to export between 21,600 and 27 thousand tons of sweet onion (i.e. between 800 and 1,000 containers) which is their usual volume.
The sector’s challenges
Miguel Ognio also spoke about the challenges that the sector must overcome to be sustainable. He said that Peru was it’s own worst enemy because they carried out the shipments of the product in a disorderly manner, causing a lot of volume to be concentrated in certain weeks, which led to a fall in prices due to market saturation.
He added that the strength of the Peruvian sweet onion in the North American market was its flavor and high quality, and that unfortunately there was much neglect in the product being exported, as some of the onions exported are spicy, which harm’s Peru's prestige.
"The market expects to receive Peruvian sweet onion because of its high quality and if it starts to get spicy onions we’ll lose prestige (which allows us to obtain premium prices). Then we would have to start competing with the US production, which has no sweet onion, and that would open a window so that other countries that do not have the same quality that we have enter that market," he said.
Another challenge is respecting the maximum residue limits of agrochemicals. He said that some producers were applying more agrochemicals to their products because they had higher yields. As a result, when the product reaches the international market it is rejected, which also affects Peru as an exporter.
Other challenges include the congestion at the port of Callao (which could generate serious problems for perishable products), the irrational increase in logistics, and the high price of chemical inputs, among other issues that decrease the competitiveness of the national product.
Source: agraria.pe