France triggers an apple glut

A CRISIS is looming in English apple orchards. Cider makers are in distress, the humble fruit growers are being stalked by banana producers and the Cox is under siege from The Bomb.

Nuclear fall-out has reached our shores in the form of French apples. Other Europeans are boycotting French produce in protest at its atomic indiscretion in the South Pacific, but the British are welcoming the resultant glut of Golden Delicious in our supermarkets, and the apple growers are furious.

"It's not that we're whingers, it's the principle of the matter," wails Malcolm Schofield, head of the English Fruit Company in Kent. He is alarmed at reports of Golden Delicious on sale for 24p a pound in some shops - half the average Cox price. "I'm not here to talk about the rights and wrongs of nuclear testing, but this won't do. We're not after burning French trucks of apples; we just want people to buy British apples".

Britain grows 35 per cent of the apples we consume, and the season is relatively short. Coxes, our main competitor, go on sale in September but their season is over by March. The industry, which Mr Schofield estimates employs 100,000 people, is struggling, and when a European grant to quit growing was offered last year, 14 per cent of the total acreage was surrendered.

"If this goes on, in five years' time the English apple will be a thing of the past," he says. In desperation, English Apples And Pears Ltd, the fruit growers' umbrella organisation, took out ads in the national press last week, imploring us to disprove France's assumption that we do not share fellow Europeans' environmental concern. "Support English apples!" they urged.

The threat to our apples also comes from elsewhere. The banana, announces Tesco, has stolen the apple's crown as Britain's favourite fruit. The chain has sold a record 22 million bananas in the past two months compared with17 million apples of all varieties. "The fact that it comes in its own convenient little skin, like a lunch-box, really helps," Tesco says.

The fruit has been aggressively marketed as a glamorous, energy-packed sporting snack. But Mr Schofield is giving no quarter in the fruit war. "The banana guys have done a good job, yes. But it's just not true - they are not selling more than us."

Henry Bryant's family has been growing apples in Kent for generations. The farm's prospects now look bleak. "It's not just this boycott business, you know," he says. "I'm almost more annoyed about all the fruit from New Zealand. It should've all been off the shelves by August, and it's damned well still here!"

Uncertain of the future, he has lately held off replanting apple trees and is diversifying into turkeys.

Reassurance should be at hand in the flourishing cider market. For years the drink was a staging post for adolescents. The West Country yokel joke was its only other, unfortunate, home. Cider is now sexy - inexplicably perhaps - but its renaissance is cold comfort to the traditional apple man.

"The big cider producers like Bulmers are buying up farms, ripping out the hedgerows, putting in row upon row of apple trees, spraying the lot with chemicals and killing everything," complains Ivor Dunkerton, who runs a traditional, organic cider press in Hertfordshire. "And they end up with fizzy, industrial cider - no depth, no taste - full of cheap apple juice concentrates bought in from all over the world."

Once more, it emerges, France and the Antipodes are the culprits. Cider firms insist they are forced to look abroad - "We just don't grow enough," said a spokesman for one. "I'm sorry, but what can we do?"

England's apples have all been plucked from the trees now, and are awaiting their fate in cold storage. Their future, if the French continue nuclear testing, is far from rosy. After decades of nuclear fear, the threat to the world had seemed over. But the aftershock of The Bomb, it appears, can still upset the apple-cart.