Earthquake Creates Unknown Fruit Market

Earthquake Creates Unknown Fruit Market. I'm Greg Martin with today's Fruit Grower Report. The United States depends on a lot of fruit that is imported and this past weeks 8.8 earthquake in Chile has created a bit of turmoil in the fruit market. Kevin Moffitt with Pear Bureau NW explains. MOFFITT: The earthquake in Chile has definitely thrown a question mark into how much fruit they can ship to the United States and around the world this year. We're assessing the damages, everybody's trying to assess what the damages are at this point and it's still too early to tell but there are reports that packing houses were damaged. Power outages are also affecting things like the packing lines. MOFFITT: Infrastructure damage is going to slow down if not hinder even further shipments to the ports and we know some of the ports are working to near capacity but not full capacity so just the chaos initially is going to slow some of the exports from Chile. So what does that mean to the U.S. and the pears specifically? MOFFITT: The U.S. on average imports about a million boxes of pears from Chile. The fruit that has been shipped to date is about 150-thousand boxes. So they have been shipping since probably late January, early February but it's still the early part of the season so there the potential that they will not have the same amount of fruit shipped to the United States as they have previously. We'll talk more with Kevin Moffitt tomorrow. That's today's Fruit Grower Report. I'm Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.