Some British retailers and wholesalers have been forced to make an early switch to sourcing oranges from South Africa and South America after last month’s ‘catastrophic’ floods in eastern Spain left farmers struggling to harvest and shipping their crops.
Companies in Britain have started buying fruit from the southern hemisphere several weeks earlier than in a normal year to avoid gaps appearing on supermarket shelves and fears about the quality of Spanish produce.
Persimmons, also known as Sharon or persimmon fruit, have been hit even worse than oranges by the floods because they are more vulnerable than citrus fruits, analysts and industry insiders say.
The Valencian branch of Asaja, Spain’s largest farmers’ association, estimates that the floods have caused losses of more than 1 billion euros for the region’s agricultural sector.
“The damage is catastrophic in terms of production, cultivated fields, agricultural infrastructure, agricultural machinery and vehicles, livestock farms and nurseries – and in terms of the land lost as entire fields have disappeared,” the report said.
Exports have also been hit by damaged highways and rural roads, as well as a recent blockade by French farmers protesting the signing of a trade deal between the EU and Mercosur.
However, Fepex, the Spanish Federation of Associations of Producers and Exporters of Fruit, Vegetables, Flowers and Live Plants, said exports via France have now resumed.
One farming source said it was too early to assess the full extent of the damage: “The streets are being cleared, but the fields are always the last to be cleared,” they said. “We’re talking about a lot of rural roads and they’re just not resourced.”
The source added: “We are in the middle of the picking season here and we were already expecting the harvest to be a bit lower, so if you add to that [the floods]Quite a bit of citrus has been lost. We are now in the persimmon season and that is the hardest hit.”
A major British retailer said it was forced to buy oranges from South Africa because it was so difficult to source citrus from Spain due to problems on affected roads and warehouses and damage to crops.
Jason Glass, managing director of wholesaler All Greens in London’s New Covent Garden market, said the wholesale price of oranges had risen by more than 30% immediately after the floods due to the supply disruption, although this has since fallen as as a result of competition from the south. hemisphere has entered.
The problems for British buyers have been exacerbated by the extra checks resulting from Brexit, which had already led to higher costs and longer delivery times, Glass said.
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Cindy van Rijswick, global strategist for the fruit, vegetable and floriculture sector at Rabobank, said the sector had expected orange supplies to be below the four-year average, but higher than last year, while prices for easy peelers had already risen. had previously been high. the floods in anticipation of a bad season.
She said: “It is not yet clear how much additional pressure the flooding will have on supplies.”
However, not all farms in Spain are equally affected. One major retailer said it had “no major issues” with supply as the location of its growers meant they had seen only minimal impact on crops as citrus is grown well beyond the Valencia region.
A citrus industry source told the Guardian that the main problem remained a logistical one: getting the fruit off the trees, packing it and then loading it onto trucks bound for Britain and other parts of Europe. According to them, the citrus harvests as a whole had withstood the rains and floods of recent weeks in Valencia and beyond.
“Even in the parts of Valencia most affected by the floods, people are coming in and seeing that a lot of fruit can still be saved,” they said.