ABSTRACT
The Citrus Industry can be distinguished into three sectors: production, harvest and utilization. Production involves field operations, harvest involves plucking of fruits form the trees and utilization involves marketing of fruits, as fresh fruits, juice or concentrate, etc. In developing countries, these sectors have little relevance although technically independent of each other. Growers in these countries are mostly small landholders and operate their orchards following traditional methods. They grow plants to produce fruits without reference to their utilization. They also harvest their products in a traditional way. But their production and harvest have no technical link. Harvesting is done manually, mostly by hired labor. Once harvested, or before the harvest, fruits are purchased by dealers/wholesalers for their marketing, either as fresh fruit or as raw materials for industries. Growers initially collect the fruits in bamboo baskets to load them in trucks. The dealers/wholesalers store the fruits in a warehouse after collecting them from different orchards, and repack them in wooden boxes to send to distant markets or industries, whichever is convenient to them. In some warehouses, fruits are treated with fungicides to minimize storage and transit spoilage. There is no production system based on potential ways of utilization of the product. As the harvest is totally a manual process, the production system remains technically unrelated to it. Generally speaking, it may be stated that the citrus industry in most developing countries lacks coherent growth and the postharvest processes remain completely neglected, resulting in substantial loss of product utilization. Growth of the orange fruit processing industries is very limited due to the poorly developed relationship between production and utilization.
