The latest estimates given this week by the agricultural union COAG foresee that in this 2023-2024 campaign, some 400,000 tons of lemons will be thrown away in the fields of Spain that there is no way to sell, about 27% of the planned production. This is a massive waste with losses already valued at 120 million euros, for which Spanish farmers blame the other citrus fruits that enter the European Union from Turkey, Egypt, Argentina or South Africa; to investment funds that alter the market; to supermarkets that only want aesthetically perfect fruit; to the increase in pests; to climatic adversities… However, another part of the sector openly recognizes that the main reason for this lemon collapse is the disproportionate increase in crop hectares in recent years in the Spanish Levant.
Among these voices is one’s own World Citrus Organization (WCO, for its acronym in English), which points out the excessive growth of crops in the country as the number one cause of the disaster and fails to understand why the entry of foreign lemons is criticized when it is the Spanish who are everywhere. Europe. “Spain is the leader in the market, it is the one that controls the situation, it is always easy to blame someone else, but we must accept that we are in markets in which there must be a minimum of competition,” Philippe Binard, secretary, comments by telephone. general of the WCO. “Let’s look at what happened with the tractor demonstrations in Europe, our headquarters are in Brussels, the Belgians complained about the Dutch, the French about the Spanish, the Spanish about the Moroccans…” he ironically says.
The Interprofessional Association of Lemon and Grapefruit (Ailimpo) —which represents in Spain the group of producers, cooperatives, exporters and the processing industry of the lemon sector— not only distances itself from the voices that blame others, but admits the need to reduce the cultivated area in the country to rebalance supply and demand, and proposes a different path than some of those protests of tractors: apart from tax reductions, improvements in agricultural insurance or the promotion of increased consumption, it is also committed to a more environmentally friendly model, promoting regenerative agriculture or the management of lemon farms as forests to promote credits for carbon or biodiversity.
For José Antonio García, director of Ailimpo, there is no doubt what the problem is: “We have gotten out of hand with production.” “The data speak very clearly, we have gone from a cultivation area of 36,000 hectares eight years ago, to a current area of almost 53,000 hectares,” explains García, who explains that there were “very striking returns” that made farmers who They already grew lemons to plant more trees and at the same time a “call effect” was generated for other investors. “In the end, it is an exercise in simple mathematics, if the market is capable of absorbing 1.1 million tons of lemons, the estimated production for this campaign is 1.5 million, there are the 400,000 tons that are going to remain in the market. field”.
Pedro Gomáriz, head of citrus at COAG, recognizes the excess production in the country, but includes it as one of “a set of factors”, in which he gives greater importance to other causes. “The exaggerated amount of lemon from third countries that is entering the European Union is one of the big factors, it is unfair competition, because they also enter treated with products [fitosanitarios] “They are not allowed here, and on top of that they are coming in with pests that are not affecting us,” says the farmer, using arguments that have not been proven until now. “They come from Türkiye, South Africa, Egypt, Argentina. “They are flooding the European market with lemons that compete with ours, but without having to comply with the same standards as us, treated with products that we do not have here, with much cheaper labor and financed many times by the State, subsidized” Gomáriz insists.
Despite these types of complaints being very common in recent months, the data on lemon consumption in the EU analyzed by Ailimpo, between October 2023 and March 2024, shows a quite different situation. In those six months of the campaign, the total demand for these citrus fruits in the EU (excluding domestic consumption in Italy and Spain) was 403,000 tons, of which 302,000 came from Spanish fields and the rest, 87,000 left Turkey. That is, three out of every four lemons consumed in EU countries in these months have been grown in Spain. According to this interprofessional citrus association, these figures are also similar to those of previous years, so they cannot have a significant impact on the disaster of the current campaign, which runs from September to June (first with the Fino variety and then with Verna).
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Gomáriz also blames the disaster on some “oligopolistic” practices of supermarkets, decisions by investment groups and some weather events, while downplaying the importance of planting more trees to produce lemons in the country. As he maintains, “the life of a lemon tree is like a Gauss bell, its harvest increases, at 15 to 20 years it reaches its maximum and from 20 onwards it begins to decrease. So, of course, there is a lot of new lemon destined for the replacement of plantations.”
“This is like the pink elephant in the room that no one wants to see,” says García, who specifies that in the last eight years seven million lemon tree seedlings have been sold in nurseries in the country. “These are really very typical dynamics of the agricultural sector, we have seen it in other products such as persimmon, we are seeing it with the pistachio, with the almond tree, they are cycles where the farmer sees profitability in the crop and there is an explosion of the surface of cultivation.” Although it is not the only cause of the 400,000 tons of these citrus fruits that will end up thrown in the fields, for the director of Ailimpo, it is clearly the main one. “It is true that there are investment funds with participation in the lemon sector, but they have not invested a single euro in new plantations,” he concludes.
For this interprofessional association that represents the entire lemon sector in Spain, the main thing right now is to solve the red numbers of this disastrous campaign, but it also considers that in the longer term one way to maintain the economic profitability of the sector is with measures greener. “We have closely followed the development of regenerative agriculture in citrus in California and we believe that the future really lies there,” says García. “In the end what we seek is to design a system of cultivation practices with which we improve the quality of the soil, we improve biodiversity, we improve the water retention capacity, we eliminate the risk of erosion and we improve the fertile capacity of the soil, we improve the absorption of CO₂, with which we can generate carbon credits.” As he points out, “it is a topic that seems like science fiction, but it is already working in the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand, where agricultural activity also becomes a generator of biodiversity credits. Because when we think about biodiversity, we think about lizards, birds, bees, but we always forget what biodiversity is in the soil.”
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