Queensland avocados dumped amid national oversupply

Avocado farmers are resorting to dumping truckloads of their fruit as the industry grappled with an oversupply and some of the lowest farmgate prices.

It’s an arresting image. Mounds of dark-green skinned avocados evidently left to rot at a tip in Atherton, North Queensland.

Thousands of dollars wasted watering their trees, keeping the pests off and paying workers to pick the fruit. All for nothing.

But this case of abandoned food is not isolated.

For Australian avocado farmers, the rug was pulled from underneath them when Covid struck, pausing this nation’s obsession with smashed avocado.

Almost overnight, avocado demand plummeted and this coincided with thousands of avocado trees beginning to bear fruit, having been planted over the past five years to keep up with what appeared to be Australians’ insatiable demand for the fruit.

Avocado Australia chief executive John Tyas does not know the name of the farmer who was left with little choice but to dump his fruit.

He said this was a symptom of the growing pains the industry was experiencing after years of expansion that has led to domestic oversupply and a lack of export opportunities.

“We’ve been in a period of oversupply for 12 months now and there simply aren’t the markets for the fruit being produced,” Mr Tyas said.

“We don’t have a big processing industry in Australia, but those factories that we do have are full to the brim. I know growers have been donating fruit to the fullest extent to charities. The next few years will be tough until things even out again.”

He said domestic prices were as low as they could go, “at or around the cost of production”, and didn’t expect them to improve until Australia negotiated access into new export markets to take some of the fruit out of the domestic market.

Avocados left to rot reportedly in Atherton, North Queensland. Source: Facebook/Jamie Farmer Ah Gee

The picture has been shared widely on social media in a post that takes aim at major supermarkets’ practice of selling New Zealand avocados when Australia is in the grips of an oversupply.

Mr Tyas said Australian growers could supply almost year-round, but WA’s production followed a cyclical pattern with huge supply one year, followed by a smaller harvest the next. This has led supermarkets to fill the gaps with New Zealand produce between August and March.

Bucking a trend followed by other horticultural commodities of lower exports during Covid, avocado growers have grown their export markets over the past few years.

In the 12 months to March, about 10,000 tonnes of avocados were exports – mostly to Singapore, Malaysia and Hong Kong – compared to a record of 4000 tonnes before Covid.

“They (exports) haven’t been particularly profitable, but they’ve been enough to keep people afloat,” Mr Tyas said.