Southern Hemisphere and Mediterranean suppliers have shifted their mandarin shipments into September and October, the weeks in which Spain's largest citrus region opens its campaign, lifting extra-EU arrivals in those two months to some 135,000 tonnes last year from 52,000 in 2020.

September and October are the weeks the Valencian Community brings its first fruit to market, and the run-up to the Clemenules, the mid-season clementine that anchors production in the province of Castellón. The overlap is the point of the season the Spanish trade regards as decisive for the campaign as a whole.

South Africa is choosing to concentrate exports of its late varieties into those weeks, coinciding with the start of the northern hemisphere harvest and the launch of the first Spanish mandarins, Castellón Plaza reported on 3 August, citing the Spanish agriculture ministry's reinforced-monitoring report on EU citrus imports. Valencian growers and exporters have said the European market stayed heavily supplied with South African fruit through October last season, and that they no longer regard that as exceptional.

South Africa's September–October shipments to the EU rose to 110,721 tonnes last year from 32,818 tonnes in 2020 — almost all of the five-year increase — according to Eurostat figures accessed via Cropli. Peru, the next-largest counter-season supplier, has been broadly flat since 2021 at about 13,000 tonnes, and Turkey ships little in those two months. The figures cover the three customs lines that together make up small citrus – mandarins and satsumas, clementines, and hybrids – with intra-EU trade excluded.

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The ministry's report put extra-EU small citrus imports at a record 589,181 tonnes between September 2025 and June 2026, up 33.6 per cent on the previous campaign and 52.8 per cent on the five-campaign average. Cropli's own extra-EU series, which runs only to May, shows the same pace, at 545,024 tonnes, up 23.6 per cent year on year.

South Africa led the season on the ministry's figures with 149,828 tonnes, a quarter of the total; Turkey almost doubled its shipments to take second; and Morocco, which had led the September-to-June window for most of the past decade, fell to third. Egypt nearly tripled its volumes to take fourth place.

Rows of citrus trees on the coastal plain at Castelló de la Plana, with the town and mountains on the horizon under a cloudy sky

Spain's citrus season "has begun slowly, primarily due to delayed fruit ripening and increased competition from Southern Hemisphere mandarins, which now arrive over a longer period", the US Department of Agriculture's Foreign Agricultural Service in Madrid wrote in its annual EU citrus report on 7 January.

The same report forecast that EU tangerine and mandarin imports would "remain stable in MY 2025/26 as the somewhat reduced availability in non-EU Mediterranean countries would preempt imports from expanding".

The southern fruit is arriving against a Valencian crop forecast close to a two-decade low. La Unió de Llauradors i Ramaders, the Valencian growers' association, put the region's 2026/27 citrus harvest at just under 2.6mn tonnes in a technical forecast published on 6 August, the second-smallest in twenty years – although 3.4 per cent above last season, which was the minimum. It forecast small citrus at 1,067,000 tonnes, up 2 per cent, with clementines practically unchanged and the growth coming mainly from hybrid varieties.

Castellón accounts for 553,524 tonnes of that total, including 250,000 tonnes of Clemenules, on the association's provincial breakdown reported by Castellón Plaza. FAS Madrid took a different view of the same variety in January, when it expected "a reduced clementine harvest" for midseason types including Clemenules and Clemenvilla.

Two farm workers picking citrus into crates loaded on a quad bike between rows of orange trees in the Northern Cape, South Africa

Spain's orange production fell about 6 per cent in 2025/26 to a 16-year low on the agriculture ministry's estimates, FAS Madrid said in the same report — and still Spanish Navelina at Rungis, the Paris wholesale market, averaged €1.11 per kg over November to February, against €1.33 a season earlier, a fall of 17 per cent, according to Rungis quotations accessed via Cropli.

The crop now coming to market has been through the hottest summer in the Valencian record. June and July were the warmest of the past 86 years at all six of Cropli's Valencian citrus monitoring points, beating 2025, which had held the record at every one. Castellón de la Plana averaged 26.69C, or 3.19C above the 1991-2020 normal; Nules ran 2.74C above it and Valencia City 2.48C above. AEMET, the Spanish meteorological agency, has said the June–July bimester was the warmest in its national record.

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Cropli's Andalusian comparison points, at Seville and Huelva, ranked only third and sixth over the same 86 years.

Water is not the constraint this season. Reservoirs in the Júcar basin stood at 1,827 cubic hectometres, or 64.2 per cent of capacity, in the first week of August, and the Spanish national reserve at 69.6 per cent. Rainfall over the past 180 days has run at 111 per cent of normal at Castellón de la Plana and 102 per cent at Nules on Cropli's monitoring points; only Valencia City, at 71 per cent, is genuinely dry.

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La Unió attributed its low forecast to ageing orchards, weather that hampered fruit set, pest and disease pressure, rising costs and the continued abandonment of plots – 2,762 hectares lost in 2025, with citrus area down roughly 15 per cent over the decade. "In the Valencia region, in addition to the adverse climate conditions, long-term challenges like aging plantations, inadequate varietal mapping, and farm abandonment are contributing to the downward production trend," FAS Madrid said.

La Unió's figure is a technical estimate rather than a field-measured aforo. The agriculture ministry and the Lonja de Cítricos de Valencia publish the official campaign forecast in September. The Clemenules reaches the market in early November.