Gran Canaria will make history by sending the first tons of fruit to the Peninsular market next week.

The Cooperativa Agrícola del Norte is preparing the first shipment of papaya to the Peninsula. A test shipment of 10 tons that will depart next week (if temperatures and sun hours allow it), from several farms in La Aldea de San Nicolás.

With this, the oldest cooperative in the island, founded in 1922 and gathering 300 farmers, wants to create a niche with tropical fruit- This fruit even has a tag on each piece with the brand "Gran Canary product, an island of flavours".  This was done thanks to the initiative of farmers themselves to take advantage on product exports to expand the image of the main industry in the island. Thanks to the support given by the Tourism Department, that welcomed the idea since the beginning and made the tags.

The project intends to place 1.5 tons of papaya (Intenzza variety), every year, in Portugal and continental Spain, then in the Netherlands and Germany. They're just waiting for the Council for Agriculture from the Canary Islands Government to publish the integrated production norms so they can get into the two last markets.

Until now the attempts to place traditional papaya in the exporting circuit didn't result due to its low resistance capacity. With Intenzza, from Mexico, it's possible, due to a longer life cycle, according to sources in the cooperative. This excited a dozen associates, most of them from La Aldea, but also from other parts in the island, to go and cultivate a joint area of some 24,5 hectares.

The farmer's gamble is out of the need to support agriculture by exporting different products, mainly the ones impossible to cultivate in Spain and Europe, due to their climate. In the Intenzza's case, the competition is the Brazilian variety, that according to produces can be a serious opponent.

Using the same dynamics, they're testing watermelon. A delivery was made last week, but there's no reason showing up for this to replace banana and tomato in the exports balance. Even despite reference prices for banana last year, being really low, according to the cooperative, demanding that "it's given to agriculture the importance it deserves, with more investment on research and development, more subsidies and use of new technologies, all that so more young people join the sector".

Alicia González Sánchez, an economist that manages the Agricultural Cooperative from the Cooperativa Agrícola del Norte de Gran Canaria, qualifies the first shipment as "historical" for the island, so it opens another front in Europe, but also because it links the export of an agricultural product to the promotion of Grand Canary. "Since we're exporting", she explained, "we should link tourism to agriculture, keeping these two sectors more connected. There's no sense in working apart".

www.freshinfo.com: Source: Laprovincia - Publication date: 5/30/2011