Orange Floride : la deuxième plus petite récolte de la décennie
Envoyé le 23 décembre , 2009
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US (FL): Incredible disappearing oranges
Florida is growing its second-smallest orange crop this decade, forcing futures traders to focus on two key elements—fruit size and weather—as the calendar flips to 2010. The U.S. Agriculture Department estimates the current 2009-10 Florida crop at 135 million 90-pound boxes, down 17% from last year’s crop.
Making matters worse, unusual weather conditions have conspired to make the fruit smaller than average this year, so it takes more oranges to fill a box.
Adverse weather in early 2009, the continuing threat from crop diseases and the recent onset of winter weather could prompt the USDA to make further downward adjustments to its crop projection in coming months. This would push prices for juice futures—up 20% over the past month—even higher.
The nearby frozen concentrated orange juice contract on ICE Futures U.S. hit a 22-month high Monday, as investors fretted about the season’s first blast of arctic air in Florida. The January contract settled down 3.1 cents to $1.3285 a pound Tuesday, as the cold temperatures failed to damage the crop.
Smaller-size fruit is especially problematic given that the average number of fruit per tree has declined 19% this crop year from last season. The USDA in a December crop production report cited below-normal fruit sizes and freezing weather followed by drought in early 2009 as the main culprits.
The industry also continues to lose trees to canker and citrus greening. Canker is a bacterial disease that weakens a tree’s productivity and blemishes the fruit. Greening is also a bacterial disease, spread by the Asian citrus psyllid, that kills a tree within two to three years. Florida is currently wrestling with a glut of young trees not yet considered bearing.
Though orange growers had no hurricane damage this year, Florida is producing a crop that is a little more than half of what it used to grow just six years ago, noted James Cordier, analyst and founder of Optionsellers.com. Given the market’s bullish fundamentals, FCOJ futures could trade as high as $1.50 a pound early in 2010, and could rise further as risk appetite grows, he explained.
Meantime, orange juice demand has steadily improved thanks in part to concerns about the H1N1 virus. Total orange juice sales are up 5.3% so far in 2009-10 compared to the same period in 2008-09, data from retail tracker A.C. Nielsen show.
