Quality imports threaten Australian dried fruit

The Australian dried fruit industry says it's facing tougher competition than ever for quality from its overseas competitors.

The local industry has struggled with successive wet seasons, resulting in more damaged fruit like sultanas being delivered to processors.

Chair of Dried Fruits Australia, Mark King, said that in a good year local fruit used to be superior to imports, but the rest of the world is catching up.

"Australia grows good quality fruit, the world never used to. You go to Turkey and they grow it on small areas and the quality of the fruit is not that great," he said.

"But now they have processing plants over there that turn average fruit into fruit equal to ours."

Mr King said the fruit had to be of a good quality or it risked losing markets.

"We can't expect the processors to be paying us for rubbish."

Grower Ivan Shaw, from Merbein South in north-west Victoria, recently helped to produce a best practice guide for the industry.

He said growers were facing wetter seasons and they needed to start using new rain-tolerant varieties and techniques available to improve grape quality, or risk having fruit knocked back.

"There's good markets for good quality fruit and virtually no market for poor quality fruit," he said.

"So in order to be a good viable, flourishing industry you need to be consistently supplying good quality fruit."

Source: http://www.abc.net.au/

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