Spain: Watermelon season starts with low prices

The early watermelon campaign started this year with low prices due to a coincidence in the market with the products from Senegal and South America, forcing producers even to stop harvesting.

The producing areas of Almería and Granada are the first ones to harvest early watermelon, from which around 60% is exported mainly to markets in the European Union, and the cultivation area was, this year, some 5% more than in 2010. According to the president of the Provincial Association of Harvesters and Exporters of Horticultural products of Almería (Coexphal), Manuel Galdeano, prices were, this year, some 30 to 40% lower than in the 2011 campaign.

Apart from pointing to the competition from Africa and Latin America, Galdeano also pointed to a lesser consumption registered in Europe, volumes were reduced also due to low temperatures. At Asaja, the technician José Ugorri underlined that at the start of campaign the lower prices registered, around 0.10 Euro per kilo, on black watermelon, which represents about 30% of production.

According to his data, prices were somewhat superior for the striped seedless variety, representing 40% of the total and reaching 0.20 Euro per kilo, while the best quotations were on the seedless black watermelon - around 0.30 Euro per kilo. These numbers, he added, offer "not so good" perspectives on the rest of the campaign, that will have its peak in a month's time, despite depending on several factors, like the weather evolution and the harvesting in other producing regions. According to Andrés Góngora from COAG, the start was "disastrous", as the European market was "quite flooded" with product from third party countries, since cold weather during Spring reduced consumption and prices for the Spanish watermelon are equal to the imported ones, despite a smaller quality.

Góngora said that the worst scenario was for the black watermelon, the most traditional variety, that in many cases "wasn't sold".

Sources at UPA agree on qualifying the campaign as "very bad" due to low prices, that weren't enough to cover production costs and forced some farmers to abandon harvests, despite the fruit's "excellent quality". According to them, specialized companies are hired some usually, increasing costs. Moreover, in some cases, producers harvested hoping to compensate low quotations of other vegetables like tomato or cucumber, which wasn't possible, according to agroinformació.