While drought has put the strain on volumes this year, Jan Hoon of Franschhoek Marketing has an optimistic long-term outlook.

The drought in South Africa has pushed down volumes of persimmons this season, although fruit quality remains good with slightly smaller sizes available.

Speaking with www.freshfruitportal.com, Hoon explains how overall volumes have decreased between 10% and 15% this year, mainly as a result of the country’s worst drought since the early 1980s.

For some considerable time now, areas of the country have been hard-hit by drought which some believe has been exacerbated by the weather cycle El Niño and climate change.

"We are around half way through the persimmon season at the moment, we normally start in the third week of March and the season is finishing up first or second week of June," says Hoon.

"We’ve experienced a relatively normal season, although some areas have been influenced by the drought that’s for sure, so the fruit size is slightly smaller but in terms of volumes, normally we do around 2,500 Metric Tons (MT), but this season it’s less.

"Of course the drought in parts of South Africa is affecting all sorts of fruit production, not just persimmons. At the moment we have fairly reasonable weather and there is not too much rain, but we are definitely going to need some rain over the winter."

Franschhoek Marketing is the owner of the long-established trademark Freshness First or F1, and although the persimmon is a much smaller commodity compared with better known South African produce items such as citrus, pome fruit and stone fruit, it is a sector to watch over the coming years.

According to Hoon, South Africa production of the fruit will significantly increase by 2020 as new plantings are on the cards later this year and into 2017.

"Persimmons are mainly grown in the Western Cape and our company has about 120 hectares as we’ve been growing the fruit for quite some time.

"We see growth in the future but not within the current varieties we have in South Africa. Rojo Brillante, the Spanish variety, would be the main new production. It will not be straight away, but we will definitely be planting this Spanish variety.

"There’s very big growth in Europe on the newer varieties and we do recognize this growth and want to be part of it. We realize this will not happen with the current varieties we have in South Africa, but we will be able to tap into this growth with the new variety."

Currently Europe, in particular Germany, absorbs large volumes of South African persimmons shipped from Cape Town to Rotterdam in around 17 days.

"The U.K. is a growing market with roughly 10% to 15% of our volumes going there as well and then smaller volumes going to the Middle East and Far East markets, with a little supply also going into Canada."

Hoon estimates persimmon production will last until early June and supply will go into July.

Once the 2016 export is over, plans for new Rojo Brillante will gather pace.

www.freshfruitportal.com