tthenewstribune.com
By Tim Johnson
McClatchy Foreign Staff
March 6, 2015
CIUDAD GUZMAN, Mexico —
Mexico, already the world’s third-largest exporter of blueberries,
raspberries, blackberries and strawberries, is searching for ways to get
U.S. consumers to throw more fresh blueberries into the pancake batter
and heap more raspberries onto their fruit salads.
As long as U.S.
and other foreign consumers wolf down berries, Mexican proponents of
the industry say, the surge will continue. And that’s more than just an
agricultural oddity in a land better-known for fields of blue-green
agave and patches of cactus. The growth of the berry industry has had
major consequences on regions long afflicted by high unemployment and
drug-related violence.
The industry, which didn’t exist less than
two decades ago, employs more than 100,000 people and reaps nearly $1
billion a year. And it’s still emerging from its adolescence.
“We’re
starting some huge growth,” said Javier Trujillo Arriaga, Mexico’s
senior federal plant health director. “It’s been spectacular, absolutely
spectacular.”
“It’s likely the industry will employ 200,000
people in five years,” added Mario Steta Gándara, former head of the
National Association of Berry Exporters, a trade association that began
only five years ago.
Berry cultivation isn’t the province only of huge industrial farms. Similar to coffee farms, berry operations vary in size.
“You
can have the 500-acre or 600-acre guy, but you also have people making a
decent living on 5 acres,” said Steta, who’s general manager of Mexico
operations for Driscoll’s Berries, a fruit giant based in Watsonville,
Calif., with more than a century in the berry business.
The story
of Mexico’s berry industry begins in distant lands – California and
Chile – where fruit farmers encountered a number of difficulties ranging
from water shortages to high shipping costs and inadequate access to
migrant workers. So growers looked elsewhere.
“I worked in
raspberries for 10 years in Chile,” said Sergio Vargas, a Chilean who’s a
partner in Berries Paradise, an exporter with a logo that describes the
concern’s products as “a piece of heaven.”
He and his Mexican
partner have 1,500 acres of blueberries and raspberries under
cultivation in neat rows under open-sided plastic covers. The fields are
in the southern highlands of Jalisco state along the Pacific coast.
“We
started at zero in 2008,” Vargas said. “It’s cost a lot to learn how to
grow blueberries here. . . . We’ve had a sharp learning curve.”
They’ve
settled on a variety of blueberry known as Biloxi, a name taken from
the city in Mississippi, which is adapted to the warmer temperatures and
milder winters of Mexico.
Unlike in the United States, the
blueberry bushes don’t drop their leaves here, and the growing season is
from November to May, or longer. Harvests are smaller per acre but
“it’s still a good business,” Vargas said.
Most of the berry
farms are 4,000 to 5,200 feet above sea level, an elevation that blunts
the fierce heat that beats down along the coast. While strawberries are
grown widely in Mexico, other berries are largely limited to Jalisco,
Michoacan and Colima states, all of which border the Pacific, since
that’s where the necessary refrigerated supply chain is centered.
The
regions traditionally had been home to much different kinds of plants.
When foreign growers came to the areas of Jalisco where berries now
flourish, they found sugarcane. In neighboring Michoacan, berries took
over from avocado plantations.
Trujillo, the government crop
official, said major sugarcane growers would hire only 50 people to tend
25,000 acres. That same acreage for berries, he said, employs 2,000
people to tend the bushes and harvest the fruit by hand.
Mexico’s
largest berry producer is Driscoll’s, the California concern. Its chief
executive, Miles Reiter, a third-generation berry man, came to Mexico
around 1995.
“A worker . . . in California invited Miles to a
wedding in Jalisco in the middle of winter,” Steta said. “He came, he
saw the environment . . . and he wondered if it was not the right
environment for berries.”
Reiter quickly determined that bushes
and vines would sprout from the soil, but he kept his plan low-key for a
number of years, quietly doing trials in Mexico in the late 1990s. Then
conditions in California pushed him to action. An anti-immigrant mood
made it harder to get field labor there to harvest his berries.
“California’s
challenges are really providing an opportunity for Mexico. Labor and
immigration are really big issues. You do not have the labor to harvest
these crops in California,” Steta said.
The berry industry’s
growth has been so rapid that hurdles have arisen. At some times of the
year, the country lacks refrigerated trucks to move berries, which have a
shelf life of about 45 days. Better laws are needed to protect
proprietary varieties. And capital costs are high. Rather than coming
from seeds, the vines and bushes must be propagated from roots and
stems, usually brought from the U.S. and elsewhere.
Two dozen
companies now belong to the berry exporters’ association, and those that
have mastered the supply chain note proudly how quickly their berries
get plucked from the vine or bush, sent to cooling chambers, then on to
refrigerated trucks.
“These trucks,” said Daniel Partida Salazar,
as he stood on a shipping dock for Sunbelle, another grower, “go
directly to the United States. When the doors shut here, they don’t open
again until Chicago.”
When Mexico-grown berries show up on U.S. supermarket shelves, few consumers notice the provenance.
“The
same brands that U.S. consumers are used to seeing on supermarket
shelves – like Driscoll’s, like Naturipe, like Dole – are sourcing
(their berries) in Mexico now,” said Mario Andrade Cárdenas, a grower
from Michoacan state who’s the head of the berry exporters’ association.
“Today, Mexico is the principal source of berries for the United States outside of U.S. production,” he said.
But
growers here seek to diversify. While 80 to 90 percent of exports head
north, growers also air-ship to Europe, North Africa, the Middle East
and East Asia.
“The consumption of berries just keeps growing.
People are eating them for all their anti-oxidant properties, their high
fiber and their beneficial effects,” said Casimiro Dávila, purchasing
chief for Hortifrut, a Chilean company with major investments in Mexico.
Dávila said Mexico had cut sharply into Chile’s global berry-market share.
“Mexico
just killed Chile in production of blackberries and raspberries,” he
said, “because the cost of air shipment was so high.”
Mexico now produces 30 percent of the world’s blackberries.
Berry
growers here have met defeat in only one area: convincing Mexicans
themselves to eat more berries. Mexicans eat less than a tenth of what’s
eaten in the United States, where per capita consumption of fresh
berries tops five pounds a year.
Read more here: http://www.thenewstribune.com/2015/03/06/3673004_mexico-best-known-for-tequila.html?rh=1#storylink=cpy
MEXICO CITY –
Mexico’s IGAE economic activity index rose 2.6 percent in January relative to
the same month of 2014, driven by growth in the agricultural sector, the
National Institute of Statistics and Geography, or Inegi, said
Wednesday.
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