Mango exporters in Mindanao eye Chinese market

Mango exporters in Mindanao said the government should pursue further talks with the Chinese quarantine authorities to come up with a mutually acceptable quarantine protocol for fresh mango shipments.

At the same time, they urged the Bureau of Plant Industry (BPI) to follow up on its earlier request addressed to Lu Houlin, deputy director general of China’s Department for Supervision on Animal and Plant Quarantine, to give the country enough time to evaluate and improve systems and procedures in shipping mango to China. China warned it will cut off mango shipments from the Philippines this month unless it adopts the vapor heat treatment (VHT) method for eliminating fruits pests such as fruit fly.

In a joint position paper, the Mindanao Fruit Industry Council (Minfruit) and Philmango Industry Foundation Inc. said the Chinese VHT requirement will hurt Mindanao mango growers which in more recent years, have been aggressively expanding mango hectarage to keep pace with the rising demand in major markets such as Japan, mainland China and its territory, Hong Kong.

Mango producers said that currently, there is only one VHT plant in Mindanao and it is controlled by Dole Philippines primarily for its shipment to Japan and South Korea. Manila-based fresh mango exporters to Hong Kong/China get mangoes from Mindanao during the off-season. The mangoes are usually air-freighted from Davao to Manila and shipped to Hong Kong.

With the VHT requirement, Hong Kong/China exporters will be forced to buy mangoes from Mindanao growers at very low prices to factor in the added cost of VHT treatment as well as the already high airfreight cost. This will, in turn, further dampen the Mindanao mango industry and the whole Philippine mango industry which has already been suffering from high production costs (particularly very expensive agro-chemicals and fertilizer), generally unfavorable weather conditions, erratic farm-gate prices and rising transport costs," the two groups said.

Minfruit and Philmango said imposing the VHT requirement for fresh mango exports to China will unnecessarily increase the landed cost of the product in the retail market.

Exporters said the cost of VHT treatment is estimated at P40 per kilogram and will make fresh mango exports to China unaffordable for many Chinese consumers. This in turn, will effectively reduce total demand for fresh mangoes and subsequently, lower export volumes.The lower demand for fresh mangoes will also dampen mango farmgate prices nationwide.

Industry data show that Philippine fresh mango exports to Hong Kong totaled $7.1 million in 2005, or about one-fourth of our total exports of $26.6 million. Industry sources noted that a large percentage of the Hong Kong shipments actually end up in Southern China (Guangdong Province). If China requires VHT treatment for Philippine fresh mangoes, total mango shipments to Hong Kong will be adversely affected as the Hong Kong market alone will not be able to absorb much of our shipment.

In the last bilateral meeting between the two countries held last February, China informed the Philippines it will impose quarantine VHT treatment starting this May to control fruit fly on fresh mango exports. For years, local mango exporters have had easy access to China which is not particularly meticulous in imposing sanitary and phytosanitary quarantine measures.

We told the Chinese authorities that the imposition by May does not give exporters enough time to make the necessary preparations and the new investment for a VHT facility that will be exclusive to China," said BPI officer in charge LealynRamos.

National mango research and development chief and former BPI director Hernani Golez pointed out that the required quarantine measure is not supported by an import risk analysis (IRA).

We want to investigate the matter because currently such fruit fly does not even exist in the Philippines," noted Golez.

BPI has also requested China for information on the method of sampling, sampling size and percentage of infestation by shipment; the stage of larvae and maturity of fruit when shipments were intercepted and samples of intercepted pest.