Jakarta –
Australia is currently experiencing an oversupply of grapes. There are millions of grape vines that must be destroyed in order to control production and prevent prices from plummeting.
The reason is that if fruit continues to be produced, supply will become increasingly abundant and could threaten farmers.
Quoted from Reuters, it is stated that wine consumption throughout the world is experiencing a decline. This has a bad impact on Australia, which is one of the largest wine producing countries in the world.
As the fifth largest wine exporting country in the world, Australia now has a stock of more than two billion liters of wine or about two years’ production by mid-2023. Some of it has been damaged because owners rushed to throw it away or sold it at random prices.
“We just keep planting and losing money,” said farmer James Cremasco in the town of Griffith, quoted by Reuters, Sunday (10/3/2024).
The decline in demand for grapes means farmers in Griffith are having difficulty with abundant harvests. The fruit will wither and rot on the tree.
Then another farmer named Andrew Calabria said that as far as the eye could see there were around 1.1 million vines in what was once one of the largest vineyards in Australia. now turned into a pile of gnarled and twisted wood.
Indeed, grape prices decreased to an average of US$ 200 per ton last year. This is the lowest in decades. Prices are predicted to continue to decline in the next few years.
Chairman of the Riverina Winegrape Growers Farming Group, Jeremy Cass, explained that in order to balance the market and increase prices, a quarter of the vines in the Griffith region had to be removed. This means that more than 20 million grape plants on an area of 12,000 hectares or around 8% of the total area in Australia that grows grapes must be destroyed.
However, many farmers do not want to uproot their plants. The farmers said they would lose out if they pulled out the plants, but they were still confident about the prospects for the grape crop and hoped the market would improve.
(hal/kil)
2024-03-10 12:30:08
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