Follow Up: Where Your Oranges Are From

Video unavailable. Read transcript below.

Download this video (5.5 MB, MP4 format)

October 19, 2009 – Following your leads, KPBS investigative reporter Amita Sharma tells us why most of the oranges we eat in San Diego are not locally grown. The answer may come as a surprise.

Video Transcript:

San Diego is sending its oranges to the Far East. And the oranges we’re eating here are coming from as far away as Africa. Hi, I’m Amita Sharma. A couple of weeks ago, I asked you to tell me where your oranges were grown. It turns out, that a lot of you are eating oranges from Australia, South Africa, Peru and Chile. Only a small number of you are buying oranges grown in San Diego County, even though San Diego County grows 95,000 tons of oranges each year. In fact, locally grown oranges are considered some of the tastiest in the world. Countries like India, China, Korea and Japan pay top dollar to buy San Diego oranges. So why aren’t we eating oranges grown here? We posed that question to John Demshki of the California Citrus Mutual. He says we -- San Diego consumers -- are the reason. We like our oranges to be bright orange, easy to peel and seedless. Those oranges come from Australia. Our oranges may be sweeter, but they have a thinner skin, they’re tougher to peel, and they have seeds. So what’s better for us and the environment, eating locally grown oranges or does it matter? We’ll report back to you with what we find.

PaulRowe | October 22, 2009 at 6:04 p.m. ― 3 years, 7 months ago

As the owner of an Orange Grove in North County, I was interested in this article.
In recent years, oranges grown here have had such a low value that pickers fail to show up and the oranges just fall to the ground and rot. I have several photos of our Naval Orange Grove taken in March of 2006 showing a carpet of oranges on the ground. Those oranges were good sizes and good quality, but the market was apparently down that year because of an abundance of crop so nobody would pick them.

So it is infuriating to see oranges from Australia in the local Alberstons and oranges from Chile at Costco selling at high prices. I bought a few of the Australian Navels just to see how they compared and they were not up to California taste. of course Australia can offer Navels in our Summer, while ours are harvested in early Spring. I wonder, do they buy our Navels when the Seasons are reversed?

A friend of mine also has an orange grove and invited me over to watch a machine come in that can rip out the trees and grind them up. His water allocation had been cut 30% so he decided to rip out 30% of his grove. I have some pictures of those if you would like to see one.

The growers have been put in a position where they have no leverage or control over the selling price. The large packing houses only tell you what they'll pay after they pick the crop. There are very few of them that even want oranges from San Diego county anymore as I understand it. The small packers sometimes fail to follow through on what they promise and don't even answer their phone if they don't want to pick the crop.

I would love to hear from other growers in San Diego County and possibly learn whether or not some of them have better stories to tell.

I'm switching to organic and hope that may be an answer.

It does seem a terrible waste to let good fruit fall the ground when there is much hunger in the world and why use fuel to ship oranges from Australia to California when we had plenty of good Valencias here this year?

( comment permalink | suggest removal )