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Multinational food and agricultural company Dole plc (DOLE) has stated that it is raising the prices of its pineapple products.
Former United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) economist Richard Volpe sits down with Brad Smith to talk about the price pressures citrus fruits are currently facing.
Volpe is currently a professor of agribusiness at California Polytechnic State University (Cal Poly).
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company household known name in Dole. They are taking some efforts and and actually raising their pineapple prices, but as we think about the broader kind of citrus category, if you will, that that Dole is known for, especially in the fruits and whatnot. How are you evaluating this and and what are the other foods that could potentially be in danger of some of those price fluctuations higher?
Yeah, that's a great point. Um, we haven't really been talking about citrus fruit much recently. Of course, eggs have been dominating the headlines, and I'm actually kind of thankful that we haven't been talking about eggs today. Um, but citrus is facing sort of a two-pronged assault right now. Um, domestically, as a lot of folks know, uh, citrus greening is a disease vector that's affecting citrus production in the Southeast United States, mostly Florida. Uh, you know, we don't have an answer to it yet, producers don't have a solution to it. So we're seeing the production of processing fruit in the American Southeast declining really rapidly, and that's already translated into a higher cost for for orange juice as a great example. And then there's sort of a a latitudinal belt on the globe that stretches from central South America over to Africa that's been experiencing a lot of wild weather in the last few months. And that's been affecting everything from, you mentioned pineapples to other citrus fruits, to avocados at some point, to sugar and to cocoa. And these are all categories that right now, we're starting to see inflation really pick up. Um, so a lot of it has to do with weather, the domestic issue, the domestic side of that right now is sort of systemic, and we're looking at that to be baked into the cake for years to come.
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