Chile floods Asian markets with cherries for CNY

There's a perception that Chinese New Year means boom time for many Tasmanian primary producers, but cherry growers are largely leaving the Asian market over new year to the Chileans. Chile has more than a thousand shipping containers of cherries on the water heading to Asia right now, and significantly higher labour and quarantine costs means Tasmanian growers can't really compete. It's not all doom and gloom, Tasmanians have other markets to chase during this period, particularly in Europe. But one of the state's larger cherry producers, Tim Reid says it highlights the importance of establishing multiple secure markets. "The market's been good in Asia up until now; we got an early start which was an advantage because we got into the market before Chilean fruit arrived by sea. "Chile's producing more and more cherries every year, their quality is improving.

"I had a report about a week ago that there was 1,400 40 foot sea containers on the water from Chile to Asia; they're starting to arrive in Hong Kong, in fact, a ship arrived in Hong Kong earlier this week with 600 containers of cherries and of course that's had an effect on the market. "The Asian market is chockablock with 28mm cherries from Chile which are quite high quality, and at much, much lower price than we could ever hope to produce cherries in Australia." "We have to market our way around all that." Mr Reid says quarantine costs have become much higher since a 40 per cent rebate on inspections was discontinued and that contributes to the difficulties Australian growers have in competing with chile for export markets.

Source: abc.net.au