Record heat in Peru's coastal valleys has taken a year of growth out of the world's second-largest avocado export industry, after the growers' association abandoned a forecast of up to 20 per cent more volume and warned that the campaign will finish a month early.

ProHass, which represents Peru's Hass avocado producers and exporters, cut the figure six times in five months: from 15 to 20 per cent growth on 19 January, to 10-15 per cent in February, 7 per cent in March, 6 per cent in April, 3.16 per cent on 3 June and, on 30 June, none at all. Peru shipped a record 722,754 tonnes of Hass in the 2025 campaign, 38 per cent more than in 2024.

"The normal thing is for Peru to maintain relevant volumes until mid-September," José Antonio Castro, the association's president, told FreshFruitPortal on 3 June. "This year we could finish the season in mid-August."

At Virú, in the Chao valley of La Libertad and the commercial centre of the export zone, daytime maximum temperatures averaged 27.44C across June and July, 6.09C above the 1991-2020 normal and the highest in the 87-year record, according to ERA5 reanalysis data held in Cropli's weather baselines and computed point by point. That is above both the 2023 coastal El Niño, at 26.65C, and the 1997 super-El Niño, at 24.50C.

[explore layer="origin-chart" originId="research-avocado-peru" pointId="peru-avocado-lib-viru" tab="temperature" snapshot="es_ca9400b5d9b7a524" title="Virú Valley temperatures against the 30-year envelope" subtitle="Cropli monitoring point, Chao district, La Libertad, against the 1991-2020 P10-P90 band"]

Virú's daily mean, at 22.50C, also ranked first of 87 years. Cañete, in Lima, recorded its warmest June-July daytime maximums on record, 4.70C above normal, and Huarmey, in Ancash, its warmest overnight minimums, at 20.98C and 4.59C above normal. SENAMHI, Peru's national meteorology service, has called the winter anomalously warm, with coastal air temperatures up to 5C above normal.

ProHass attributes the shortfall to the combination of the two. Sustained daytime and overnight heat accelerated the accumulation of dry matter in the fruit while stopping it sizing up, so trees reached the legal harvest threshold on undersized fruit, with more of the crop dropping in the field and less of it exportable in the back half of the season. Peru picks against a stricter trigger than its competitors. "Peru is probably the only Hass avocado exporting country that has raised its minimum dry matter standard to 22 percent," Castro said.

The customs data corroborates the association's own count, but then diverges from it: EU imports of fresh and dried avocado from Peru, under HS code 080440, reached a record 136,900 tonnes in January to May, 7.9 per cent more than a year earlier, according to Eurostat figures accessed via Cropli. ProHass's separately derived container count for the first 20 weeks of the campaign put growth at 7.91 per cent.

The earnings did not follow the volume. The same shipments were worth €384.7mn against €377.1mn, a rise of 2.0 per cent. The average unit value fell to €2.81 a kilogram from €2.97 in the same window last year, €3.10 in 2024 and €3.27 in 2023. May, the heaviest month reported so far, printed €2.21 a kilogram, the weakest May since 2019.

[explore products="080440" reporter="eu" partner="PE" view="chart" series="dual" years="2015-2026" title="EU avocado imports from Peru, value against volume" subtitle="HS 080440, euros and tonnes, 2015-2026; 2026 covers January to May only"]

Peru's own expansion is the reason: it shipped 416,500 tonnes to the EU in 2025, 33.6 per cent more than the year before, passing the Netherlands to become the bloc's largest supplier by volume; the Dutch figure is overwhelmingly re-export of the same fruit. Peru accounted for 23.4 per cent of EU avocado imports last year, and by June this year was running at 68 to 75 per cent of European supply, with operators selling below cost to clear stocks.

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Wholesale prices have since turned. Peruvian Hass at Rungis, the Paris wholesale market, held at €0.65 a fruit in boxes of 20 through late June and the first week of July, stepped to €0.70 on 8 July and €0.75 the day after, and reached €0.80 on 15 July, where it has stayed for 15 consecutive quoting days to 4 August, according to Cropli's price data. The rise from the June average is 18 per cent, the largest over that window since 2019; in three of the past five years the same weeks fell.

"If the campaign ends earlier, the European market will be the one that feels the reduction in Peruvian supply the most," Castro said.

The valleys are now at bud break, the point in the cycle at which the following season's flowers are set. The ECMWF's SEAS5 seasonal model puts Virú, Huarmey and Cañete between 3.3C and 4.8C above its own climatology in every month from August to January, peaking in October and November, across flowering and fruit set.

ENFEN, Peru's multi-agency El Niño commission, held the country at coastal El Niño alert on 17 July and said air temperatures would remain well above normal along the entire coast through September. It put the event as more likely than not to reach strong magnitude, did not rule out an extraordinary one late in the year, and expects the alert to run to April 2027.

Damage from a coastal El Niño reaches the avocado crop a year late. "In 2024, total production declined two percent due to unusual 2023 weather conditions like heavy rains, and high temperatures that affected the 2024 harvest," the US Department of Agriculture's Foreign Agricultural Service post in Lima wrote in its most recent report on Peruvian avocados. Exports fell to 590,000 tonnes that year from 619,000 in 2023.

SENAMHI has warned that warm nights in Lambayeque and La Libertad are pushing trees into vegetative growth instead of floral initiation for the campaign that begins this month, and expects smaller calibres on the central and southern coast.

Mission Produce, the largest US avocado distributor, runs its Peruvian packhouse at Chao, in the Virú valley. It is buying Calavo Growers, its closest US rival, for 0.9790 of a Mission share plus $14.85 in cash for each Calavo share, an implied $27.15 and a premium of about 26 per cent on Mission's 13 January closing price, according to the registration statement it filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on 9 March. Calavo shareholders would hold about 20 per cent of the combined company.

Mission's fiscal third quarter ended in July. ProHass has published no campaign data since week 21, in late May, when shipments were running 9 per cent ahead of a year earlier.