A sweet year for SA lemon producers

An increased worldwide appetite for lemons has seen an upswing in the shipping of the fruit by SA citrus growers this season. This is good news for transporters carrying the fruit from the Eastern Cape province, where harvesting is under way from the orchards clustered around the Sundays Rivers and those of Senwes and Hoedspruit further north. “Lemon markets around the world are showing good to excellent returns, which is incentivising exporters in South Africa to optimise packing so as to meet this demand,” Justin Chadwick, CEO of the Citrus Growers’ Association (CGA) said last week. The incentive of higher prices driving SA’s lemon production is the result of frost damage that decimated Argentina’s lemon crops, leading the US Department of Agriculture to predict a 4% drop in worldwide lemon production for 2013/14. Increased production in Spain and Turkey is not enough to make up the shortfall, prompting buyers to turn to SA growers. In 2013 at this time (week 27 of the citrus packing and shipping season), 6.8 million 15kg cartons of lemons had been shipped to overseas markets. The same week this year finds 7.6m cartons shipped. Total lemon shipments for all of 2013 was 10.4m cartons. Taking into account prospects for a favourable global market for lemons at the start of this year, the CGA originally predicted a 20% upswing of shipments. However, even this good projection has been revised upward. “It is immediately evident that the good market conditions have resulted in additional lemons being packed from week 20 onwards. Due to this increase the Lemon Focus Group has increased its prediction for annual packed and passed export volumes for 2014,” said Chadwick. 12.5m cartons of lemons are now expected to be shipped this year, compared to an earlier estimate of 12.1m. With shipments to the EU becoming more cumbersome due to new protocols regarding Citrus Black Spot (CBS) disease, more product is moving to the Middle East and Russia. The port of Durban remains the main export port.