Union of Unions of Farmers and Ranchers has warned that the wine sector is facing a new harvest campaign conditioned by the early start of the harvest, which is taking place between ten and fifteen days earlier than usual due to heat waves. To this factor are added the complications in closing contracts with prices that are remunerative and a demand for wine that continues to decline both in the national market and in exports, which leads the organization to demand the immediate activation of a vineyard start-up plan.
The organization has detailed that the repeated heat waves have forced the early start of the harvest in many producing areas, generating notable uncertainty about the final volume of the harvest and accentuating the absence of agreements that ensure sufficient income to cover production costs.
According to the latest data from Infovi, the last campaign concluded with a production close to 33 million hectoliters of wine and 4.3 million hectoliters of must, while stocks are around 30 million hectoliters. To this scenario is added the announcement by several wineries to reduce or even give up the purchase of grapes.
In this context, the agricultural organization has denounced that winegrowers "continue to be the weakest link in the value chain" and are still facing serious problems in obtaining prices that ensure the economic viability of their operations.
From the entity, they emphasize that "This situation is not solely due to a bad campaign, but to a fundamental problem that the sector has been dragging, marked by the decline in demand and lack of profitability, with a food chain law that is not functioning and the absence of strong measures aimed at resolving the situation," reiterating that "a start-up plan is already needed."
Union of Unions maintains that a structural problem cannot be addressed only with temporary regulatory tools, such as green harvesting or crisis distillation, as they consider them insufficient to reverse the trend.
For this reason, the organization insists on the need to implement the vineyard start-up measure, in order to orderly adjust the productive potential to the real evolution of demand and thus help recover the profitability of wine operations.