Annona Species Monograph.pdf - Crops for the Future

Chapter 12. Economic Information
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deliver their fruits at the farm gate or along the roads. If these small farmers
had proper processing infrastructure, they could add value to their raw
produce themselves. However, limited or complete absence of access to
capital keeps farmers at the subsistence level, preventing them from making
decisions for profit maximization (Van Damme and Scheldeman, 1999).
Organization into associations or cooperatives is a possibility for increasing
access to capital, as well as producing a significant quantity of fruit that
could attract larger buyers.
12.2 Marketing and commercialization
Marketing involves the policies that provide strategic support to get a product
or service into the consumer market, helping to guarantee the commercial
success of the initiative. It also involves the actions taken by individual
entrepreneurs to sell their products. Marketing is often the weakest part of the
production-to-commercialisation system in which annona growers must
participate to sell their products.
Cherimoya has well established international marketing activities, with Spain
and Chile as the main producers and marketers. The other annona fruits,
however, are traded mostly in national markets of the countries where they
are produced. According to Bandeira and Braga Sobrinho (1997),
Bonaventure (1999) and Van Damme and Scheldeman (1999), the national
and international markets for annonas are limited for the following reasons:
1. Annona species have not received adequate institutional support to be able
to obtain financial credit with lower interest rates, good paved roads to avoid
fruit damage, extension services to transfer technology and see good planting
material is available, or for research to develop new cultivars.
2. Due to short shelf life and poor postharvest technologies, significant losses
of fruits in transport impedes their export success.
3. Processed pulp is sometimes of low quality and does not meet the
standards of the international markets, principally because adequate
processing technologies are not readily available to most producers,
especially small growers and wholesalers.
4. Lack of international market information, mainly for tropical Annona
species, restricts crop and product diversification where it might otherwise be
successful. Success in fruit commercialisation is entirely due to marketing
policies. These depend on several factors, such as markets with established
production-to-commercialisation systems, farmers' organisations, transport