Chile’s renewable food industry is an exporting phenomenon; it has grown up quickly and now equals the country’s historic extractable resource — copper.
And although Chile’s growers weren’t able to reach their past peaks of around 750,000 tons of apples shipped or prevent a light drop in table grapes, the 2015-16 growing year saw higher volumes of blueberries, avocados, and citrus.
During its annual conference on September 1st at Hotel Casino in Talca, the organization that represents the producers, manufacturers, suppliers and exporters for Chile’s food industry, known as “Chilealimentos", focused on food safety, especially what the U.S. Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) might mean to them as exporters.
At the sessions, Chilean manufacturers of canned and frozen juices and others products, along with their growers, distributors, and suppliers, learned how to stay off the import alert at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration under the new FSMA rules.
Chile’s food exports are a broad and changing mix. Fresh fruit totalled 2.5 million tons, up by almost 6 percent compared with the previous year. However, the mix is constantly changing. Chile now sends 99 percent of its raspberries for freezing or other processing because it decided its thousands of small growers could not be competitive in the fresh market.
Chile’s raspberry producers came in for some special attention during the conference; all who were in attendance were provided with a glossy 20-page brochure produced just for raspberry farm workers.
It’s only one piece in a strategy aimed at rebuilding Chile’s place among raspberry exporters. Today, among the top raspberry producers are Poland, Serbia and Mexico, which supplies much of the fresh market in the U.S. that Chile once dominated.
According to Antonio Dominguez, the Chilean who chairs the International Raspberry Organization (IRO), raspberry production in Chile reached about 60,000 tons before falling off a few years ago, Currently, raspberry production in Chile is running between 36,000 tons and 40,000 tons, with only 1 percent of that going into fresh sales.
Chile wants to regain the top spot in raspberries, but that is going to be a complicated process. It means 8,000 raspberry growers must step it up. The role of existing growers is important because most are family farmers with plots of land too small to support automatic picking equipment.
That’s why "Chilealimentos" unveiled its new Manual of Best Practices for Producers of Raspberries.
It is a document that contains plenty of graphic illustrations with safety tips like - not using the fruit truck to also haul soil or other material that might be contaminated and keeping toilets away from the fruit. The instructional document urges farm workers to follow good production practices in working with raspberries.