Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
In South America most of the increase in production in Argentina was in
the period up to
, whereas in Chile output continued to increase rapidly
in the
s and in Brazil the rapid increase in production was
virtually confined to those two decades. Planting in Brazil was mainly in Santa
Caterina province in the south, with emphasis on the relatively new cvs. 'Gala'
and 'Fuji'.
In South Africa production increased
s and
-fold over the period
/
to
, the rate of increase being fairly steady, while growth in apple production
in Egypt and Morocco was much more rapid in the
s than previously. It is
notable that in
production in Egypt and Morocco together considerably
exceeded that in South Africa.
Production in New Zealand expanded steadily, increasing
-fold over the
period considered, with a pattern of change very similar to those in the other
southern hemisphere countries, Chile and South Africa, where apples are also
grown mainly for export.
ThefiguresgiveninTable
showdominanceofarelativelyfewcountriesin
apple production, but the concentration of output in relatively small favoured
areas is even more striking. More than half of the total output of apples in
the USA is from a small number of river valleys in Washington State, where
the fruit trees are grown in irrigated semi-desert country in the rain shadow
of the Cascade Mountains (Figure
.
). Similarly, Italy is the world's seventh
largest producer of apples and more than
.
% of its production (Sansavini,
) are from a very small area of the
Trentino and Alto Adige provinces. In Poland, another major producer, the
area around Grojec, about
) and half of its exports (Oberhofer,
miles south of Warsaw, has one of the greatest
apple orchard concentrations in Europe, accounting for
% of Poland's fresh
apple production in
(Florkowski
et al.
,
).
Pear production, although on a much smaller scale than apple production,
has followed a similar pattern of expansion in recent years. China was
the leading country in
. Italy, Spain,
Argentina and Japan are all relatively higher-ranked for pear than for apple
production although they each produce more apples than pears. Produc-
tion in western and central mainland Europe (Italy, Spain, Germany, France,
Belgium/Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Portugal and Austria)
gave
, having overtaken Italy by
% of the world's output over the years
/
but despite a slight rise
in output by
% of the world output in that year. This
relative decline was because of major increases in output in China, Argentina,
Turkey, Chile, South Africa, Iran and others (Table
produced only
).
There is a similar concentration of production within specific areas, as is
found with apple. More than
.
% of Italian output of pears comes from the
