Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
The same cannot be said for the latter, which is about as close to a perfect example of
the ruination of industrial agriculture as you will ever find. Originally, the Red Delicious
was a pretty good apple. But it was not very red - more golden with red stripes. As is so
often repeated in the fruit industry, red sells, so farmers began pushing for Red Delicious
varieties with deeper and deeper color - to the point that many of the strains that are grown
today are nearly black. What the farmers failed to notice is that as the skin of an apple
darkens, it also develops a more bitter taste. Furthermore, when you begin selecting fruit
strictly on the basis of color, other attributes fall quickly by the wayside. As a result, the
modern Red Delicious is frequently mealy and insipid, with a bitter finish.
Still, it sold and sold. And farmers planted more and more. And apple lovers bemoaned
the sorry state of the Red Delicious and the lack of all of those beloved antique varieties
they had so adored. But their complaints fell on deaf ears. Growers were selling about as
many apples as they could grow - and for pretty good prices - and they weren't about to
do anything that might upset the cart. In fact, the commercial quality standards on which
wholesale apple prices are based became heavily skewed toward the Red Delicious, re-
warding the fruit that was the biggest and reddest with the highest prices.
A closer reading of the situation would have revealed some troubling trends. For in-
stance, apples were not attracting new customers at home: America's per capita apple con-
sumption remained almost flat for the second half of the twentieth century. As a result,
more and more fruit had to be sold overseas, in Canada, Mexico and Taiwan. In the 1970s
America exported about 6 percent of its apple crop. In the 1980s that increased to 12 per-
cent, and by the turn of the new century exports had increased to 20 percent. In an effort to
appeal to overseas buyers, particularly the Taiwanese, American farmers started planting
some new varieties that had been developed in the Pacific: Gala (from New Zealand) and
Fuji (from Japan).
And then the apple world's sleeping giant woke up. In the early 1980s the Chinese gov-
ernment decided to begin allowing trade with the outside world. Perhaps due in part to
the success ofAmeri- cans selling in Taiwan, apples, which to that point had been a fairly
minor crop in China, became a focal point. Apple production in China increased by more
than 750 percent from 1980 to 2000. Apples - primarily Fuji, Jonagold, Golden Delicious
and Gala - are now the most widely planted tree fruit in China.
As these low-priced Chinese apples started hitting what had traditionally been Americ-
an export markets, the effect on U.S. farmers was disastrous. By some estimates, as many
as half of the apple growers in the United States went out of business in the last twenty
years of the twentieth century. In just the five-year span from 1997 to 2002, well after the
