Susan Gordon, Business Reporter

Paul Miller, chairman of the Citrus Growers Association.

The head of the umbrella group for Jamaica's citrus growers, Paul Miller, says there are emerging opportunities for the island to pump earnings from fruit in the face of what he sees as a long-term decline in world citrus production.

But to grasp these opportunities, Jamaica has to aggressively replant its citrus groves, which in recent years have been hit by the trestiza disease that killed plants and reduced output.

"There is new opportunity for export earnings from citrus," Miller told Wednesday Business.

According to Miller, if Jamaica does the right things, its citrus production, at under 126,000 tonnes in 2005, could reach the levels of Belize, its Caribbean Community (Caricom) partner in Central America where output is between 150,000 and 190,000 tonnes a year.

Increased production

With increased production there would be more citrus to export and earning from the crop would rise sharply, in contrast to the decline of recent years, he says.

Jamaica last year exported a mere 2,375 tonnes of citrus - most of the production is consumed domestically as fresh fruit - a decline of 5,353, or more than 60 per cent. Export earnings over the period dropped from US$4 million to US$1.48 million.

Miller's bullishness on citrus in Jamaica has been fed recently on the recent hikes in the price of frozen orange juice concentrates on the back of U.S. forecast for reduced production, driving primarily by a second year of low output in Florida.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture, for instance, reported a fortnight ago that Florida's orange production, still unrecovered from hurricanes in recent years and hit by frost, would end the 2006/2007 season at 135 million boxes.

Lowest output

This will be the lowest output since 1990 and 44 per cent below the last 'normal' crop in 2003/2004.

The weakness of production in Florida will add to problems elsewhere, leading to a forecast of an 11 per cent overall decline in US production this season, to 7.89 million tonnes.

Florida is the world's second largest producer after Brazil, with hundreds of thousands of acres of land under the crop, compared with a mere 2,000 acres or so of citrus groves in Jamaica. Brazil produces about 400 million boxes of orange a year.

But the Jamaica Citrus Growers Association's Miller claims that in both countries, orange groves are under pressure from alternative land users.

In Brazil, he claims, that pressure is from sugar cane, which is grown primarily for ethanol production. As the citrus growers have yielded, he says, orange production has declined, now hovering at around 300 million boxes a year.

In Florida, Miller argues, the pressure on agricultural land is coming from real estate developers, and orange groves are not immune.

Nonetheless, Brazil has about 48 per cent of the world's orange juice market, with the U.S. in second place with just over 37 per cent. The Brazilian company, Cutrale, which owns the U.S. company Minute Maid, acquired from Coco Cola a decade ago, is perhaps the world's biggest producer of orange juice.

But even with their American connections, the Brazilian producers have not been immune to what they consider to be unfair actions by the U.S.

Last month the Department of Commerce imposed a 24.62 per cent anti-dumping duty on the import of Curtrale's orange concentrate into the United States, because the company was allegedly selling at below the cost of production to the detriment of Florida and California producers. An anti-dumping tariff of 60 per cent was placed on other Brazilian suppliers.

susan.smith@gleanerjm.com.