Mexican producers of white garlic fear that, despite having achieved excellent yields, they won't be able to sell their product to the markets because of the excessive admission of Chinese white garlic into Mexican territory, said the manager of the Garlic Product System, Hostilio Torres Robles.
The presence of Chinese garlic in the Mexican market has lowered this product's placement prices and put the producer's potential gains at risk, as local farmers of this product are unable to lower costs due to the high investment required by this crop.
Torres Robles said that Aguascalientes produced white and marbled purple striped garlic. He also said producers were facing unfair competition from the product brought in from China and that local farmers had lost 30 to 80% of their marbled purple striped garlic production as a result of intense heat.
Faced with this situation and the substantial economic losses they are now facing, producers will request the support of the federation and the state in order to compensate for the losses, as they won't achieve prices that allow them to recover.
Torres Robles also said that this year garlic producers had harvested some 600 tons of white garlic of good quality and size in the autumn-spring cycle. He also added that they still hadn't quantified how much purple garlic they had lost to the intense heat, as the harvest was just about to begin. However, estimates are that producers could have lost up to 80% of their crops in the different areas of cultivation.
The problem with Chinese garlic, he said, is that according to our information that country cultivated 20% more garlic this year, which has been enough to invade the markets around the world and make the markets nervous, as they are leaving out other countries in this free competition.
Despite this, the Manager of the Garlic Product System said that they would have to wait until the end of this month for international prices and the needs of the countries to be defined. Meanwhile, producers from Aguascalientes will be trying to place their crops in the national markets.
Source: oem- informex