Back in May we gave the downside scenario a one-in-five chance. It arrived anyway, and through July it has only deepened.
The top of this market, it's now clear, was late March. Our index printed €443/100 kg on 26 March and was still holding €441 in the first days of April. From there it began to give way, gently at first, €434 by 9 April, then with real conviction: €404 by the third week of May, €390 a week later, €380 at the end of June, and into the mid-€350s through July. That's roughly a fifth of the price gone in three months, and as of this writing the fall hasn't found its floor.
Two things pulled the support away at once. The first was political: the EU and the US closed their framework agreement in June and it went live on 1 July, a flat 15% all-inclusive ceiling on EU goods, replacing the old Section 122 surcharge. Overnight, the tariff-free window buyers had spent all spring positioning for simply ceased to exist, and the US demand that had been quietly holding Spanish and Greek origin up went with it. The second was the crop: June fieldwork found Jaén's trees carrying 70-75% loads, and talk started circulating of output up something like 50% year-on-year in Jaén and 30% in Córdoba. When the trade support gives way at the same moment the supply outlook turns generous, prices don't drift lower. They drop.
And yet the whole month turns on a tension the market is choosing to ignore: the heat is real. A mid-June episode left a verified 3-7% fruitlet drop across the affected Andalusian zones, and between 5 and 11 July a second heatwave pushed Jaén, Córdoba and Sevilla to 42-44°C, with overnight lows that never fell below 24°C, the kind of sustained stress irrigation only half answers. The market has decided the recovery crop is big enough to absorb all of it, and July's continued slide says that conviction is hardening, not softening. It may well be right. But refusing to price a risk doesn't make the risk smaller; it just makes the eventual repricing sharper if the fields keep dropping fruit.