The climate is fattened with citrus: 2023 will be the worst harvest in ten years

The new citrus harvest will be the lowest in the last ten seasons, mainly due to the extreme weather conditions recorded this year. Thus, it will fall by 15.6%, to 1.7 million tons.

The citrus capacity prepared by the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (MAPA) estimates a production of 5.968 million tons for the 2022/2023 campaign, which began on September 1. These figures represent a significant decrease compared to previous harvests (1.1 million tons less).

You have to go back to the 2012/13 campaign to find a campaign with less product. According to the latest available data, cultivated areas increased by 1.7% in 2021 and total 219,096 hectares.

The extreme climatic conditions registered this year have been decisive in this low production, fundamentally due to the excess of rains during the flowering and fruit setting phases, and due to the extremely high temperatures in later stages and restrictions on irrigation in some regions.

By product, oranges will be the ones that experience the greatest decrease, with falls of 19.9% ​​compared to the previous campaign and 15.7% compared to the average of the last five.

Small citrus fruits will also decrease (9.8% compared to the previous year and 9.1% above the average of the last campaigns), lemon (with decreases of 12.4% and 11.3%, respectively) and grapefruit ( 13.7% and 4.5%).

orange leads

The orange will be, as usual, the citrus with the highest production, with 3,010,491 tons, 50.4% of the total. 75% of oranges will correspond to the navel group. The production of small citrus fruits would rise to 1,953,954 tons, 32.7% of the total, with clementines as the majority group (56% of small citrus fruits).

The production of lemons is estimated at 918,802 tons, 15.4% of the total citrus production, which would be the lowest figure in the last seven campaigns.

Grapefruit production would reach 75,394 tons, 1.3% of the total citrus fruit, which would be the lowest harvest of the last three campaigns, after the consecutive production records reached in the previous two.