Bonita Springs, Fla., Jun. 25 - Florida's orange crop could shrink by about 12 percent, to 140 million 90-pound boxes, within five years as the state battles the tree-killing disease known as greening, an official with the state's largest growers group said Thursday.
"One could think that we might drop to the 160, 155 million boxes as early as next year, so 140 (million boxes) could be in the next, certainly, three to five years," Michael Sparks, executive vice president of Florida Citrus Mutual said at the group's annual conference in Bonita Springs, Florida.
The 2008-2009 harvest, which ends next month, is forecast at 159.6 million boxes, down from 170.2 million last year.
Growers are awaiting a September tree census to determine how many acres of citrus groves have been lost to greening. It was first discovered in the state in 2005, just after a parade of hurricanes battered the groves, and has spread to all 32 of Florida's citrus-growing counties.
"If we don't beat greening, we simply don't have a product to sell," Sparks said.
The disease is spread rapidly by an insect, the citrus psyllid. It makes the fruit unpalatable and kills the tree within two years.
It has already pretty much wiped out the citrus industry in one southeast Florida county, Martin County, Sparks said.
Florida's $9.3 billion citrus industry produces more than three-fourths of the U.S. orange crop, most of which is processed for juice.
At present, the only way to curtail greening is to use more pesticide to kill the insects, hire more scouts to inspect the groves and immediately remove infected trees.
Eradication efforts raised growers' costs by as much as 50 percent at a time when prices were so low that those without long-term contracts were selling at a loss, Sparks said.
The current season started with a glut of juice as the economic recession and competition from other beverages cut consumption, and the industry has raided its consumer marketing budget to funnel money into anti-greening research.
But not all the news was gloomy. Juice inventories have begun to ease and researchers have recently sequenced the DNA of the greening bacterium, an important step toward the Holy Grail of genetically engineering trees to resist the disease, industry officials said.
Researchers are also keeping a close eye on some groves planted with trees believed to have some natural tolerance.
Growers are optimistic the industry can survive if they can control the psyllids and remove infected trees early enough to hang on until resistant trees are available, something that could take a decade.
Sparks said citrus growers are a resilient lot who have already weathered freezes, hurricanes, pestilence and urban development of grovelands.
"If history is any indicator, the citrus industry will survive. We'll be leaner, meaner, we'll be better for it," he said.