The Price Of Orange Juice

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Yikes! You think orange juice cost too much now?

By the time orange grower Gabriel Simoes noticed symptoms of the incurable "greening" disease last year, it was too late to do anything about it. Now four of every five trees in his 1,000-acre orchard are dead or dying. Industry officials say it's only a matter of time before California's $1.2-billion citrus industry is threatened by the "mother of all citrus diseases," which has invaded thousands of acres here in Brazil's citrus belt with sickening speed. ...Twenty-five percent or more of the state's groves could disappear in coming years if a cure isn't found, according to Markestrat, a market research firm in Ribeirao Preto, the center of the state's citrus industry. Others say the toll could be far worse.

"Greening isn't just any disease," said Nelson Marega Barrancos, manager of one of Brazil's largest orange groves, a 4-million-tree plantation. "There is no way to stop it. The future is not good."

Although greening has not yet struck California, carrier insects called psyllids were caught in traps in San Diego and Imperial counties in August, apparently after having crossed from Mexico. Authorities have since declared a 1,000-square-mile quarantine in parts of those two counties, restricting plant traffic. "This is the mother of all citrus diseases. . . . I see no reason for the disease not to be here eventually," said MaryLou Polek, a plant pathologist with the industry-financed Citrus Research Board in Visalia.

The plague has already gained a foothold in the U.S. Since greening was spotted in Florida in 2005, a year after its arrival in Brazil, it has spread throughout the southeastern United States and Texas. Before that, the disease wiped out entire citrus industries in China, India, Saudi Arabia and Egypt before migrating west. Beth Grafton-Cardwell, an entomologist and citrus expert at UC Riverside, said the state's orange grove owners and even homeowners with a tree in the backyard have reason to fear for their fruit.

"This is the scariest thing that's happened to the citrus industry in a long, long time," Grafton-Cardwell said.

Also known as huanglongbing after its Chinese origins, citrus greening is transmitted by aphid-like bugs the size of rice grains. Sucking fluid out of tree leaves, they leave a bacteria that paralyze a tree's vascular system, cutting the flow of sugar and carbohydrates from leaves to the roots. The result is a tree too weak to grow healthy fruit. Oranges shrink and take on a highly acidic taste. One insidious feature is its latent impact. By the time farmers such as Simoes notice the fading leaf color, the telltale effect of the disease, the plague has usually spread to most of the orchard.

Scientists are far from understanding even the disease's pathogens, or destructive agents, much less possible cures....the cure may lie in a transgenic strain of orange tree, an unappetizing prospect for some consumers who don't want genetically engineered produce.

Damn!
You can find the rest of this alarming story here.

Time to buy up any deals you see on cans of frozen concentrated orange juice!

 

[jeninflorida]

thank god that we have our own orange treas

Yikes! You think orange juice cost too much now?


Damn!
You can find the rest of this alarming story here.

Time to buy up any deals you see on cans of frozen concentrated orange juice!