08/14/07 Pear Meeting

Pear Meeting. I'm Greg Martin with today's Fruit Grower Report. Last week the pear industry took a look at the pre-harvest status of the crop and a look back at last years crop including marketing information for the new season. Jeff Correa, International Marketing Director for Pear Bureau Northwest CORREA: Looking at the export performance last year compared to previous years was what we've seen was since it was a smaller crop a drop in export volume but we've seen an increase in the export value and the export value has been increasing for each of the past five years and we'll probably reach a record high again this year for export value. He says the price per box is also going up. CORREA: That also corresponds to as you would imagine you know with a small crop, smaller volume that the average price per box is actually going up and we've hit a record high average price per box of the export markets of slightly over 18 dollars a box and this is compared to 5  10 years ago when it was hovering around 10 dollars a box. This trend has gone up in each of the past 5 seasons. Another area that Correa talked about was the marketing of pears. CORREA: This year we're looking to have about 3.4 million on MAP funding. This is a pretty good increase in what we've had in the last couple of years and what it's going to do is to allow us to do a lot more large scale activities and also spread out our promotional programs into more markets. That's today's Fruit Grower Report. I'm Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.