The harvest of Valencias has just started in South Africa, but despite excellent packouts the volumes are low. According to Justin Chadwick, CEO of the Citrus Growers Association in South Africa most growers are putting the low volumes down to fruit drop due to the heat and dry conditions over last summer.
As a result the Valencia Focus Group have dropped their predicted volumes by 4.8 million cartons, while the Soft Citrus Focus Group and the Navel Focus Group made slight upward changes to their predictions according to the CGA website.