'Fruit exporters must seek out new markets'

RAY SMUTS BURDENED by saturated traditional fruit markets due to increased competition and the inability to absorb growing production volumes locally, there is a compelling need for South Africa to find new markets, asserts Stuart Symington, CEO of the Fresh Produce Exporters’ Forum. He warns, however, that seeking to achieve access to new markets can become “a very demoralising affair". One has to look no further than South Africa’s 18-year struggle to achieve success for her grapes into Japan. The US had it slightly easier - nine years to access her fruit on to the Chinese market. “Staying gently but firmly in the face of a targeted country is a science and an art. There is a fine line between being pushy over one’s own self-interest and being sensitive to the oft-unknown priorities of the targeted country," says Symington. "New market access is about building a two-way street." Clearly, a generic approach to new markets no longer works, nor does the same approach to different countries - the US and China, for example. “One of the reasons we tend to lose sight of this is because of the cultural and political blind spots inherent in all of us. In the case of access to China, the South African fruit industry used a prominent South African Communist Party member to 'network' with the right people inside China in order to expedite the access process.” Symington says as South Africa continues to explore new markets for its fruit, the burgeoning eastern markets of India, Thailand, Indonesia and China should be of particular interest.