06/21/06 World Fruit Picture

World Fruit Picture. I'm Greg Martin with today's Fruit Grower Report. Fruit production is a very large global issue. Fruit producers in the U.S. are fighting against heavy hitters from around the globe for a piece of the market. Lindsay Buckner of Tree Top, Inc. says that overall global fruit production continues to increase though at a slower pace. BUCKNER: A couple of things that are interesting though if you look at from 1995 through 2000 you see a little steeper slope on that which really reflects a stronger growth during that time frame of about a little over 3% growth per year. When you get to the year 2000 on to 2003 you see that really flattens out to actually less than a percent per year growth in the world. Buckner says one of the top three producers may surprise you. BUCKNER: Probably not a surprise to anybody is the fact that China has really emerged over the last 10 years to be the dominate producer of fruits in the world market. In 2003 they represented about 19% of total world production. Close behind China is the EU producing about 14% of the total world fruit supply. And then following that is India. And I don't know if that's kind of a surprise to you but when I started looking at this information that kind of struck me because I didn't think of India as a major fruit supplier, country in the world but they're actually rated number 3. That's today's Fruit Grower Report. I'm Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.