First there was a tomato shortage in Israel, now certain fruit is also expected to be in short supply in coming months, especially pears. These are some of the effects of the ban on exports from Turkey, a traditionally large supplier of tomatoes and pears to Israel. Gabriel Raccah, CEO of Nativ Business Consulting, importers of fruit and vegetables into Israel from around the world, says, "Since August we did quite a bit of volume of tomatoes from the Netherlands and Poland. Now we have another issue with fruit. We used to bring a lot of pears from Turkey, now they're not providing supply any more."
Raccah says despite the increased tomato supply, shipping from the two European countries was a challenge. "It was quite difficult because the transit time is quite long, from the Netherlands to Israel it takes 12 days to ship the tomatoes from Rotterdam. We trucked it via Italy and shipped from there, but this still took 10 days. That's a long time for tomatoes, at that time there was nothing available here in Israel. There were some damages and bad arrivals, but in general it was ok. Since there were no tomatoes, anything that was red and the right colour was good"
Israel's agriculture ministry made several efforts to increase the supply of tomatoes since the ban from Turkey, with tomatoes from Moldova allowed, under very strict conditions. They also allowed 5,000 tons of tomatoes to be imported duty free. "The government reopened another batch of a few thousand tons to be brought in duty free. Now, growers here started to have some local crops. But, there is now a gap in production, maybe we'll have short supply for the next month. Now we're looking to new origins, maybe to Italy and Spain if possible," says a hopeful Raccah.
He says despite the imports, the tomato prices did not reduce significantly. "The price level was around €3 or €3.5 per kg, which is still a very high price. If there was no supply, it would have been much higher. It's affecting the consumption, people are consuming a lot less fresh produce due to the higher prices. Some people tried to bring tomatoes in from Turkey, but their government makes it as tough as possible. If they know it's for Israel, they issue a phyto-certificate, but with the wrong declaration, so then these people are unable to bring it into Israel," states Raccah.
There was also a lower supply of other vegetables like cucumbers, peppers and zucchini. "We have local production of cucumbers, but the prices changes daily from a wide range of €0.40 to €4. We also could not import zucchini so much. The local supply of cucumbers started 10 days ago, prices were then lower, now the supply is shorter and for the next month we're going to see high prices again."
Turkish Santa Maria pears that used to be imported into Israel before the ban.
Local pear supply to come short
Raccah says they are also worried about the local pear supply, that will not be enough. "We have a very short local supply of pears. We'll be looking to bring pears in from Greece. We will also consider other sources."
He says they are looking forward to import table grapes from South Africa. "We bring the grapes in from December. We are looking for more suppliers of grapes from South Africa," concludes Raccah.
For more information:
Gabriel Raccah
Nativ Business Consulting
Tel: +972-528-976940
[email protected]