A Crisis in the Orchard
With canneries refusing to buy, White Bluffs pear growers face a harvest season defined by uncertainty and the threat of unpicked crops.
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Pear growers in this valley as well as the other districts of the Northwest are getting uneasy over the market situation. The crop is nearly ready to be harvested but none of the buyers seem interested in pears. The canneries that have absorbed the bulk of this fruit during the past two seasons are holding off this year and it is almost impossible to get them to make any offer, or at least any offer that would pay the grower to pick, and there is a possibility that a large part of the pear crop will not be harvested. H. E. Robinson of the White Bluffs Warehouse company, who has been in Seattle this week, wired over Friday that he had been able to get one of the canneries on the Coast to make some kind of an offer, and Mr. Robinson wants a meeting of the pear growers to be held at the high school in White Bluffs next Monday evening so that he can explain the nature of the offer.
“It is almost impossible to get them to make any offer, or at least any offer that would pay the grower to pick.”
The economic vulnerability of fruit growers to distant cannery cartels is a century-old struggle in the Columbia Basin. Today, growers face similar pressures from global supply chains and volatile international trade policies.
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