ProHass, which represents Peru's Hass avocado producers and exporters, cut the figure six times in five months, from 15 to 20 per cent growth on 19 January to none at all on 30 June. Peru shipped a record 722,754 tonnes of Hass in the 2025 campaign, 38 per cent more than in 2024.

"The normal thing is for Peru to maintain relevant volumes until mid-September," José Antonio Castro, the association's president, told FreshFruitPortal on 3 June. "This year we could finish the season in mid-August."

At Virú, in the Chao valley of La Libertad and the commercial centre of the export zone, daytime maximum temperatures averaged 27.44C across June and July, the highest in the 87-year record. That ran 6.09C above the 1991-2020 normal, according to ERA5 reanalysis data accessed via Cropli.

Two other valleys set records of their own. Cañete, in Lima, recorded its warmest June-July daytime maximums, 4.70C above normal, and Huarmey, in Ancash, its warmest overnight minimums, 4.59C above normal. SENAMHI, Peru's national meteorology service, has called the winter anomalously warm, with coastal air temperatures up to 5C above normal.

ProHass attributes the shortfall to the combination of daytime and overnight heat. It accelerated the accumulation of dry matter in the fruit while stopping it sizing up, so trees reached the legal harvest threshold on undersized fruit, with more of the crop dropping in the field and less exportable in the back half of the season. Peru picks against a stricter trigger than its competitors. "Peru is probably the only Hass avocado exporting country that has raised its minimum dry matter standard to 22 percent," Castro said.

The customs data corroborates the association's own count. EU imports of fresh and dried avocado from Peru, under HS code 080440, reached a record 136,900 tonnes in January to May, 7.9 per cent more than a year earlier, according to Eurostat figures accessed via Cropli, close to the 7.91 per cent growth ProHass counted in containers over the first 20 weeks of the campaign.

However, export earnings grew more slowly amid lower prices. The same shipments were worth €384.7mn against €377.1mn, a rise of 2.0 per cent, as the average unit value fell to €2.81 a kilogram from €2.97 a year earlier and €3.27 in 2023. May, the heaviest month reported so far, printed €2.21 a kilogram, the weakest May since 2019.

Peru's own expansion is largely behind the price contraction. It shipped 416,500 tonnes to the EU in 2025, 33.6 per cent more than the year before, passing the Netherlands to become the bloc's largest supplier by volume; the Dutch figure is overwhelmingly re-export of the same fruit. Peru accounted for 23.4 per cent of EU avocado imports last year, and by June this year was running at 68 to 75 per cent of European supply, with operators selling below cost to clear stocks.

Wholesale prices have since turned. Peruvian Hass at Rungis, the Paris wholesale market, held at €0.65 a fruit in boxes of 20 through late June and early July, then climbed to €0.80 by 15 July, where it has stayed for 15 consecutive quoting days to 4 August, according to Cropli's price data. The rise from the June average is 18 per cent, the largest over that window since 2019; in three of the past five years the same weeks fell.

The valleys are now at bud break, the point in the cycle at which the following season's flowers are set. The ECMWF's SEAS5 seasonal model puts Virú, Huarmey and Cañete between 3.3C and 4.8C above its own climatology in every month from August to January, peaking in October and November, across flowering and fruit set.

ENFEN, Peru's multi-agency El Niño commission, held the country at coastal El Niño alert on 17 July and said air temperatures would remain well above normal along the entire coast through September. It put the event as more likely than not to reach strong magnitude, and expects the alert to run to April 2027.

Damage from a coastal El Niño reaches the avocado crop a year late. "In 2024, total production declined two percent due to unusual 2023 weather conditions like heavy rains, and high temperatures that affected the 2024 harvest," the US Department of Agriculture's Foreign Agricultural Service post in Lima wrote in its most recent report on Peruvian avocados. Exports fell to 590,000 tonnes that year from 619,000 in 2023.

SENAMHI has warned that warm nights in Lambayeque and La Libertad are pushing trees into vegetative growth instead of floral initiation for the campaign that begins this month, and expects smaller calibres on the central and southern coast.

Mission Produce, the largest US avocado distributor, runs its Peruvian packhouse at Chao, in the Virú valley. ProHass has published no campaign data since week 21, in late May, when shipments were running 9 per cent ahead of a year earlier.