CANBERRA: Australian citrus exports have reached a new record high of $315 million for the year, to date. Citrus Australia said so far exports for the first 10 months of the year were just under 210,000 tonnes, and this figure was expected to increase by about 20,000 tonnes.
Market access manager David Daniels said last year, Australia exported 208,000 tonnes valued at $288 million. “Clearly the exporters are targeting more higher-value markets and I think the currency helped a little bit there,” Mr Daniels said. “The last couple of years has been quite extraordinary. “We always used to quote the figure of around $200 million and it hovered around that for a lot of years, but in the last couple of seasons, we’re pushing 300 — and over 300 for this season.” Mr Daniels said for the first time, China was the number one market for Australian citrus. “Hong Kong has always been very strong, but we’ve seen a slight decline in Hong Kong with exporters targeting mainland China this year,” he said.
Mr Daniels said the export market was expected to significantly grow. “We set a pretty ambitious target to double export values by 2020, so we are hoping to hit the half a billion dollar mark by 2020,” he said. December 20 was the first anniversary of the China Free Trade Agreement entering into force and Mr Daniels said it had not had a major impact on the market. “It’s probably a little bit early to say,” he said. “It’s probably only a couple of percentage points in the past couple of years.”
Western Australia began exporting citrus for the first time last year and volumes have increased to 1,800 tonnes this year, up on 1,100 last year. This figure is expected to grow, however Mr Daniels said the industry needed more skills, infrastructure and facilities for export, such as cooling and stock handling facilities. “They’ve got plenty of fruit over there, the overseas markets are undersupplied, but it’s really just trying to skill the industry up over there and build some capacity in the sector,” he said. “It’s hard for businesses to invest into export capacity if there isn’t a guaranteed demand for their services.”
