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We Chileans have become accustomed to thinking that we are a fruit powerhouse and that our fruits – or at least many of them – walk victoriously through all the markets in the world. And since what happens in the Chilean countryside is not discussed or analyzed much in national political debates – almost as if the countryside and agricultural activity did not exist – that image continues to be repeated, without confronting it with the available statistics.
The Central Bank, in its periodic publication on Chilean exports, stops to show the trajectory of seven fruit products, which are supposed to be the most important in the country’s fruit export portfolio. These items are grapes, apples, pears, blueberries, plums, cherries and avocados. The kiwi, on which so much hope was pinned in previous years, does not appear today on this list of the main fruit exports.
In 2023, total Chilean fruit exports amounted to 6,197 million dollars. An increase of 369 million dollars compared to the previous year, which is undoubtedly very positive for the country. But where does this increase in fruit exports come from? Does it come from a general increase in the different fruits that Chile exports? Does it come from just some of them? Are there some fruit sectors that, far from increasing, have decreased in terms of their exports? Let’s examine what the statistics say about this.
Cherries not only increased in 2023 by $239 million compared to 2022, which shows a high percentage of the total increase that took place from one year to the next. Also cherries, which in 2023 were exported for an amount of 2,357 million dollars, account for more than 35% of the total fruit exports of that year. But ten years ago, in 2013, cherries were not the leading item in Chilean fruit exports. Only 392 million dollars were exported, an amount that was surpassed by grapes, with 1,569 million dollars, by apples – with 820 million dollars – and by blueberries, with 440 million dollars. Cherries have, therefore, had an explosive increase over the last ten years, going from 392 million dollars in 2013 to 2,337 million dollars in 2023. An increase of more than 2 billion dollars implies that cherries went from representing 8.4% of total fruit exports to 37.7% of that total.
And what happened to the other fruit sectors? Apples decreased from the level of $820 million in 2013 to $446 million 10 years later. In addition, apples also decreased their export level compared to the immediately previous year, that is, 2022, in which 533 million dollars were exported. We could say, therefore, that we are in the presence of a sustained downward trend with regard to access to the international apple market.
Something similar happened with grapes, which went from an export level of 1,569 million dollars in 2013 to 902 million dollars in 2023. Pears also decreased from 165 million dollars in 2013 to 118 million dollars in the 2023. Plums and avocados increased their international sales throughout the decade, the former going from $147 million to $289 million, while avocados rose from $165 million to $246 million. In any case, these are increases that cannot be compared with the substantive increase in cherry exports, nor can they explain the increases in fruit exports that occurred throughout the decade.
But if cherries are the fundamental fruit item in Chilean exports, China is the main buyer of our cherries. Almost 90% of our exports of this product are directed to that market. Therefore, the Chilean fruit boom depends to a very high extent on a single product and a single market. If China decided to eat fewer cherries – a product that is obviously not necessary for its industrial growth – or if other producers emerged in the world to compete with Chilean cherries, Chile’s situation as a fruit-growing country would become quite complicated. This is undoubtedly a potentially high-risk situation, which requires, in order to prevent it, to diversify markets and products, which is easy to say, but it is difficult to do, and even less so when the problem occurs in all its intensity.
By Sergio Arancibia