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For the first time this season, the bird feeder on the patio has seen visible activity. Mainly great tits and robins, but BH claims the odd sparrow too. Sometimes feeding from the feeder itself, sometimes hoovering up on the table and on the paving below. With squirrels and pigeons joining in this last.

We suspect a mixture of parents and fledglings from the hedge to the left, to the south, as we look out of the kitchen window.

I remember this morning about once reading that one should not feed garden birds in the summer as they need to learn to forage for themselves while conditions are easy, but I don't know how quickly I am going to take the feeder down. The birds need some help in their struggle against all the cats!

Then up to read at reference 1 of a crisis in the orange industry. I had thought the oranges we eat had come from a variety of places, the Mediterranean, the Middle East and various places beyond that, but it seems that Brazil now dominates global trade, with Florida having taken a battering from weather and disease. California and its orange groves were not mentioned. But Brazil is having its troubles too now and orange futures have climbed to unprecedented levels.

Maybe a lot more oranges go to the juice market than the fruit market. In any event, with weak supplies, the juice makers are struggling to blend the right sort of flavour at the moment. Whereas from my corner, the issue is the unreliability of oranges from Sainsbury's, which sometimes go through bad patches and in any case seem to vary a good deal, even within the one purchase.

Indulging in a bit of digging, apart from various gambling and share dealing sites which the search key 'orange trade' seems to turn up, I get to references 2, 3 and 4. From FAO, Bulgaria and Ghana respectively. The first offers lots of primary statistics, the second some economic analysis and the third the situation in Ghana, big in oranges in Africa.

The snap above comes from Bulgaria, and while Brazil might be the biggest single producer, there are plenty of others. And then production is not the same as processing, is not the same as trading. Has the FT got it right? Do Brazil and the US with 28% of world production between them, dominate the trade in the way that the FT article would suggest? 

I remember reading quite recently that one of the advantages of global trade in wheat was that it all tends to balance out across the world. Bad harvests in one area are balanced by good harvests in another. Then, on the other hand, if your banana production is heavily concentrated in just one cultivar, and that falls prey to some new pest or disease, where does that leave you? For which see reference 5: a very important banana, named for an English duke.

All a problem for someone else.

PS: I wonder if President Putin is an expert on bananas, telling his lieutenants all they need to know about them - or does he trust some suit? Trust and delegation being something that dictators tend to be a bit short on.

References

Reference 1: Orange juice crisis prompts search for alternative fruits: Bad weather and disease in Brazil have pushed futures prices to a record high - Susannah Savage, Financial Times - 2024.

Reference 2: https://openknowledge.fao.org/server/api/core/bitstreams/4760a5b5-f3b2-41c7-8713-ccdb1a5f8c08/content.

Reference 3: https://agrojournal.org/28/02-01.pdf.

Reference 4: https://iiap.info/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/iiap_guest_policy_brief_LW_Ghana_final.pdf.

Reference 5: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cavendish_banana.