After abundant rains in the first part of November, the region between Soubre and San-Pedro has had a rather normal progression into the dry season.
However, conditions have, since late November, been almost consistently slightly drier than average. This continued to be the case as rains started to return in March. It was not until the second week of April that this area started accumulating normal amounts of precipitation.
Despite rainfall being below average, it was still sufficient to support the canopy refurbishing in March. This meant that trees in this area slowly transitioned to fruit setting in the last week of March and have continued to do so since then.
The very recent above-average precipitations have brought the accumulated rainfall over the past 30 days to about 80 mm on average (up to almost 100 mm in the north). For this reason, these areas can be expected to continue contributing to a decent start of the next main crop – especially in the northern part, near Soubre.
It should be noted, however, that there hasn’t been enough rainfall to build up resilience, so trees here will remain susceptible to any possible, extended dry spell. We advise to continue monitoring this region over the coming 6 weeks.
