Years of conflict, starting with the 1999 coup, have plagued fruit producers in Côte d’Ivoire, with pineapples proving perhaps the biggest losers.
“You don’t come out of 10 difficult years and a final catastrophic one unscathed,” Philippe Mavel, European delegate of OCAB, the country’s central organisation of banana and pineapple exporter-producers, told Agence Ecofin.
Pineapple production reportedly fell from 180,000 tonnes – out of some 334,000 tonnes sold on the European market – to 38,000 tonnes in 2010 and 28,000 tonnes in 2011, out of a European market of 910,000 tonnes.
Having once accounted for half of Europe’s pineapple volumes, Côte d’Ivoire’s share of the market has become insignificant at just 3.1 per cent – partly a result of Costa Rica’s arrival on the market, the Latin American country now accounting for 80 per cent of Europe’s volumes, Agence Ecofin reported.
The main reason for this decline has repotedly been the gradual disappearance of small producers, thousands of which used to make up the country’s pineapple sector, due to their inability to withstand the crisis.
OCAB, which was created in the early 1990s to resist competition, is searching for solutions to support small and medium-size producers, one idea being the creation of a central purchasing body to market the producers’ fruit transparently and effectively.
The oragnisation equally regards the regional market as full of opportunities, both for raw fruit and processed.
“We must increase consumption,” said Mavel. “The idea is not to leave producers with 3-4ha or 10ha, but to group them together.”
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