The fresh fruit markets have several particularities because of the perishability of these agricultural products, which brings additional pressure on the farmers, namely the smaller ones, to sell quickly after harvesting. These contexts have implications on the dynamics of the markets and in the definition of the prices. The question here is if the COVID-19 pandemic and the recent conflicts had consequences on these dynamics. The evolution of the fresh fruit producer prices in the Portuguese regions and markets was assessed. A special focus was given to the apple markets, considering their importance for the diet of the Portuguese population. For that, data from the SIMA (Sistema de Informação de Mercados Agrícolas) were considered for the weeks from 2017 to 2022. The implications from the most recent occurrences—if, in fact, had relevance—seem to have been slight.
TopIntroduction
The agricultural markets are increasingly open to international trade. Consequently, they are influenced by the behaviour of the respective demand and supply (Jovicich et al., 2005). The fruit market dimensions, namely the prices, give an idea about the dynamics, returns and alternatives for the different parts involved (Adelaja et al., 1996).
The fruit prices fluctuate seasonally over the year, due to changes in the volume supplied during and outside the harvest period (Capocasa et al., 2021). These prices present lower volatility compared to vegetable ones (Uçak et al., 2022), for example, in some contexts. In general, the prices are higher during the off-season (Medina et al., 2018), such as happens with the ‘Tahiti’ limes (Spósito & Filho, 2003) and strawberries (Verdial et al., 2007).
These prices are often interrelated with the quality (Cittadini et al., 2007), size (Inglese et al., 2009) of the fruits, cost-benefit relation (Manolova & Kolev, 2012) and the decisions to collect in specific circumstances (Ghanbari et al., 2020). Nonetheless, the quality is perceived differently by the diverse actors in the fruit chains (Djekic et al., 2019). Some fruits have traditionally higher prices (Kodrat et al., 2018). The level of fruit prices also influences the diet of the population (Lei & Shimokawa, 2020).
The agricultural practices are important for the farms’ profitability (Alan Walters, 2020), specifically those related to irrigation management and harvest dates (Ballester et al., 2018). The harvest activities represent a relevant part of the total production costs of some fruits, such as citrus (Sanders, 2005).
The disease incidence in the fruits and respective plants affects the revenues of the farmers. The control of these diseases and pest is not usually an easy task (Márquez-Berber et al., 2012). This is true for strawberries (Baggio et al., 2021) and watermelon (Pereira et al., 2017), for example. The research and development programmes may bring relevant contributions to the fruit markets (Tsvakirai et al., 2018).
This research intends to bring more highlights about the Portuguese fruit prices in the producer markets with data from 2017 until 2022 from the national agricultural markets information system (SIMA, 2023). The Scopus database was surveyed (2023). Some data were assessed through the Stata (StataCorp, 2017a, 2017b; Stata, 2023) software. Normalised values equal to (xi-xminimum)/(xmaximum-xminimum).
Considering the great volume of information available for the fruit markets, particularly about prices, this chapter focused mainly on Portuguese apple prices.