Almond prices have hit a 10-year high in dollar terms on "declining supply" in California, Select Harvests, one of Australia's largest almond companies, told the Australian Securities Exchange on 8 September.

The tight market comes even as the industry's own global forecaster expects world supply to rise 6 per cent this season.

The International Nut and Dried Fruit Council (INC) put world kernel production for 2026/27 at 1,705,392 tonnes, up 4.8 per cent, in the July issue of its Nutfruit magazine, and world supply including carry-in, the stock left from the previous crop, at close to 2mn tonnes.

German nut trade publication Mundus Agri reported the table on 20 August. The July issue is not on the council's public page, and its almond page still carries a forecast dated November 2025.

Almost two-thirds of the growth comes from two countries that between them supply under a tenth of the world's kernels.

Spain is forecast up 39 per cent at 146,000 tonnes and Greece up 190 per cent at 14,500 tonnes. Australia rises 7.2 per cent to 166,892 tonnes, and the United States is unchanged at 1,201,300 tonnes.

"The 2026 crop forecast is 2.7 billion pounds (on a shelled basis), similar to the 2024 and 2025 crops," the US Department of Agriculture's Economic Research Service said on 23 July.

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USDA's statistics service, which surveyed about 500 growers in late April and early May, forecast 2.70bn lb, with bearing acreage, the area old enough to crop, down 10,000 acres to 1.39mn.

That is the first decline since 1995, and the fact Select Harvests leads on.

The two other figures the company cites as "evidence of further supply contraction", a California crop below 2.7bn lb and a carry-out under 500m lb, close a marketing year that ended on 31 July.

[chart slug="global-almond-supply-squeeze-inc-growth-by-country"]

They are the Almond Board of California's closing numbers, published on 11 August: receipts of 2.694bn lb and an estimated carryover of 494.2m lb, down 4 per cent.

The announcement does not rest on supply alone, naming those two figures and "continuing growth in demand" together as the drivers of "recent record prices".

In May, Select Harvests had called the same two numbers balanced. "A lower 2025 US crop size of 2.69 billion pounds and forecast carryover volumes see a balanced Californian crop outlook that is supporting prices," it said in half-year results on 28 May.

Buyers read the carryover as comfortable rather than short.

ofi, the ingredients arm of Olam, put it at 19 per cent of annual shipments in its August market update and called that "a healthy carryout number going into the 2026 crop year".

It listed the price among bearish factors: "Almond prices are at their highest levels in more than eight years, leading some buyers to hesitate in making long-term purchasing commitments."

Neither buyer expects prices to give way. ofi also lists the carry-out among its bullish factors, "setting up a tight transition into the 2026 crop", and puts California at 92.1 per cent sold on total supply against a five-year average of 89.7 per cent, with uncommitted 2025-crop inventory down 17.2 per cent at 248m lb.

Hamburg importer Bösch Boden Spies called the industry's starting position "fundamentally healthy" on 14 August and said pricing "is expected to remain supported as the market balances new crop receipts against uncovered global demand". Export shipments closed the year at 2.03bn lb, up 3 per cent, while domestic shipments fell 11.3 per cent.

[chart slug="global-almond-supply-squeeze-eu27-almond-psd"]

SPAIN THE WEAK LINK

Spain carries more than half of the forecast growth on its own and is the likeliest place for the INC's arithmetic to fail.

The 146,000-tonne figure comes from Almendrave, the Spanish Almond Board, published on 4 May, with a condition attached: it would hold provided weather before harvest was not adverse.

It was. Five of Cropli's seven monitoring points in the Spanish almond belt recorded their hottest June to August in 86 years of ERA5 reanalysis data.

Les Borges Blanques, in the north-eastern province of Lleida, averaged 35.10C for daily maximum temperature against a record of 33.90C set in 2025. The heat hit during kernel fill, the weeks the nut puts on weight inside the shell.

Rainfall was at or above normal at six of the seven points, and Cropli's series shows no frost across the belt at bloom, though frost was severe locally: temperatures of minus 6C during flowering and fruit set cost northern Granada almost all of its expected crop, Andalusia's regional nut board reported on 28 May.

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Growers began picking about ten days early, on days above 40C. Xavier Cullerés, head of nuts at Catalan farmers' union JARC, said on 24 August that the most exposed almonds "have not finished forming properly", though he called quality good and the effect on the crop slight.

Castilla-La Mancha, which has 156,658 hectares in production, cut its forecast for the second time on 23 August, to 13,980 tonnes, 46 per cent below last year despite 13,700 more hectares coming into bearing. Its own list of causes begins with the late-March frosts.

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A second problem with the Spanish assessment predates the summer.

The 39 per cent forecast by Spanish Almond Board is struck off a 2025 crop of 105,000 tonnes. Spain's agriculture ministry put that crop at 128,515 tonnes in USDA's tree nut annual for the European Union, and the Nut Production Board, a sectoral body, at 128,000.

A rival 2026 forecast from the farm organisations and co-operatives of the Mesa Nacional de Frutos Secos is 135,250 tonnes. Spain's institutions do not agree on the size of last year's crop, let alone this one.

Not all of them sign up to the crop figures. UPA Almería refused to endorse either the Andalusian or the national estimate.

Its secretary-general, Francisca Iglesias, said the figures "do not represent the real situation" and were "incorrect and far from what is actually in the fields", putting losses at 40 to 50 per cent in the Los Vélez, Alto Almanzora and Río Nacimiento districts.

AUSTRALIA'S EXTRA TONNES GO TO ASIA

Australia's growth is real, and Asia is taking it. Almond Board of Australia data show national shipments of 48,634 tonnes between March and June, down 4.1 per cent on the year after a wet harvest delayed the start of the season.

China took a record 24,900 tonnes and Vietnam 3,777 tonnes, up 82.5 per cent, while shipments to India, Türkiye and Germany all fell, Türkiye's by 63.7 per cent. June exports rose 22 per cent on the year to a monthly record of 17,206 tonnes.

Select Harvests is among the growers delivering the extra tonnage. In the same stock exchange filing it guided its 2026 crop up 16 to 19 per cent to a near-record 28,800 to 29,600 tonnes, despite some of its regions taking more than 300 per cent of average harvest rainfall in late February and early March.

It lifted the pool price it pays growers to A$10.26 a kilogram, 91 per cent of it hedged at US$0.665, and said 81 per cent of the crop was sold or contracted.

[chart slug="global-almond-supply-squeeze-australia-shipments-destinations"]

Europe is the clearest test of whether extra tonnes reach the buyers who want them.

USDA's Madrid post forecasts EU-27 production rising 27 per cent across two seasons to 184,742 tonnes while imports fall to 250,000 tonnes, leaving total supply lower at 452,742 tonnes.

On Eurostat figures accessed via Cropli, the US share of EU almond imports from outside the bloc rose from 91.5 per cent in 2023 to 95.9 per cent in the first half of 2026, while the bloc's intake from Australia fell from 18,662 tonnes to 3,924.

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The INDFC builds its country lines from national industry bodies, which have run ahead of national agencies before. Its 2025/26 Turkish hazelnut estimate of 609,000 tonnes was the highest of six figures set out in USDA's Türkiye tree nut annual, against 449,000 tonnes from the agriculture ministry.

A CALIFORNIAN SQUEEZE, NOT A GLOBAL ONE

Cropli's own price series says the squeeze is real but narrower than one headline number suggests.

The unit value of US in-shell almond exports reached $5.88 a kilogram in July, the highest month since February 2016 on US Census Bureau data. Shelled almonds, the kernel trade Select Harvests sells into, realised $6.68, below the $6.78 of June 2025 and inside the band they have held for eight months.

The United States exported 749,457 tonnes of kernels in the twelve months to July on the same data, 7.1 per cent more than the year before.

Green almond hulls swelling on the branches of an almond tree among its leaves, in the province of Albacete, Spain

The squeeze is also Californian rather than global. Quotations for natural Californian kernel delivered into central Europe rose between 7 and 12 per cent in the fortnight to 25 August, Mundus Agri reported, with NPX 23/25 grade up from €7.31 ($8.44) to €8.16 ($9.52) a kilogram.

Spanish-origin kernel over the same weeks sat at €5.20 to €5.35 a kilogram, where it was last season. Cullerés called that "a price that at the very least lets you work this crop, live off it and keep backing it".

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The cause Select Harvests names is only partly in force. California's groundwater law has had the Tulare Lake subbasin on probation since April 2024, obliging most pumpers to meter, report and pay $300 a well plus $20 an acre-foot, and a court narrowed even that on 12 August, barring the State Water Board from enforcing probation in two of the subbasin's groundwater agencies.

The state has imposed no pumping limits anywhere. The first, in the neighbouring Tule subbasin, would be "the first ever attempt by the state to actually impose pumping limits on landowners", SJV Water reported, and its draft plan is not due until the summer of 2027.

The Almond Board of California's August position report, the first of the new marketing year, is due within days.

USDA's tree nut annuals for the EU-27, India, Türkiye and Chile all landed between 17 and 30 September last year. None has been published for 2026.