SOURCE: Marvin Barquero, La Nacion
TRANSLATION: Freshplaza
Honduras’ Hass avocado has gone from accounting for 4.17% of all Costa Rican imports of this fruit in 2018 to 30% in the first nine months of 2020, positioning the Central American country as Costa Rica’s leading supplier of Hass avocado.
According to the records of the statistical portal of the Foreign Trade Promoter (Procomer), in 2017 Honduras exported its fist 42 tons of Hass avocado to Costa Rica; in 2018 shipments amounted to 379 tons, and between January and September 2020 it has already shipped 720 tons of Hass avocado to the country. This volume is above the volume sent by Chile, Colombia, and Peru, although below the volume of avocados sent by Nicaragua, a country that mainly places the Criolla variety in Costa Rica.
In 2015 Costa Rica suspended the issuance of permits for Hass imports from Mexico and eight other markets (Australia, Spain, Ghana, Israel, South Africa, Venezuela, and the state of Florida, in the United States) as a phytosanitary measure to avoid the sunspot disease.
Since the blockade, Chile and Peru took the lead in supplying Hass avocado to Costa Rica, but in the last two years, the presence of Guatemala and especially Honduras has increased significantly.
Price evolution
According to the Analysis and monitoring of avocado markets, published in July of this year, the maximum price achieved by the national Hass avocado between January 2018 and July 2020 was ¢ 2,908 per kilo, in the month of March 2020, while the lowest value was ¢ 1,806 per kilo, in February 2019.
In supermarkets, between January 2019 and July of this year, the maximum price achieved by the national Hass avocado was ¢ 3,933 per kilo and the minimum was ¢ 2,070 per kilo. Meanwhile, the imported Hass avocado achieved a maximum price of ¢ 4,025 per kilo and a minimum of ¢ 3,176 per kilo.