State Seeks OK From U.S. To Ship Fresh Citrus Fruit

By Susan Salisbury, The Palm Beach Post, Fla.

Apr. 14–Florida Agriculture Commissioner Charles Bronson has asked the U.S. Department of Agriculture to temporarily allow shipment of fresh Florida citrus to non-citrus-producing states, as long as the fruit has been certified canker-free within 60 days of harvest.

Indian River Citrus League members who heard the proposal at their board meeting Thursday said it’s crucial that fresh-fruit markets be kept open as they prepare for the harvest season. Without that, growers will be living with too much uncertainty as they wait for permanent federal fruit shipment rules to be formulated, which could take another year.

“It creates a lot of anxiety,” said Bobby Sexton, president of Oslo Citrus Growers Association, a Vero Beach-based firm.

Citrus canker, a bacterium that weakens trees and blemishes fruit, was declared endemic in Florida in January, as a 10-year eradication program ended in failure.

Florida’s citrus growers are planning for the coming season, and the lack of any guidance “as to how, or even if they will be able to ship fresh fruit for the 2006/2007 season severely hampers their ability to make informed business decisions,” Bronson wrote in a letter to U.S. Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns.

Most of Florida’s citrus is grown for juice, but the grapefruit market’s profits lie in fresh fruit.

“If you lose the fresh grapefruit market, then the crop will all be put into juice,” said Nat Roberts, general manager of the Callery-Judge Grove near Loxahatchee. “You will have such an oversupply of juice that you will see a financial collapse of that market.”

And demand for grapefruit juice is dropping dramatically.

U.S. consumers are drinking 50 percent less grapefruit juice than they were just four years ago, said Robert Norberg, economic and market research director at the Florida Department of Citrus. Annual per-capita consumption is a fifth of a gallon, compared with more than half a gallon in 1999.

Citrus-producing states such as California want assurances that fruit that shows no symptoms cannot spread canker, said Tim Gottwald, a USDA plant pathologist based in Fort Pierce.

This week, Gottwald, part of a team of 10 scientists from the Florida, California and citrus-producing countries such as Spain, Argentina and Brazil, began conducting experiments with canker-infected fruit to see whether the bacterium survives after harvesting, chlorine dips, washing and waxing at a packinghouse.

Gottwald said the California citrus industry’s concern is whether a piece of infected fruit could be mixed in with a piece of uninfected fruit and be shipped out of Florida.

“It’s a quality-control issue,” Gottwald said, suggesting an electronic means of culling fruit is needed at the packinghouse.

For now, growers are hoping for the best.

“I am going on the assumption we will be able to market our fruit,” said Stan Carter, citrus division manager at McArthur Farms in Port St. Lucie. “The fruit has bloomed and set.”

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