On Friday, the Luxembourg Fruit Growers' Association held their traditional visits to political stakeholders and to RTL's headquarters in Kirchberg, voicing demands for concrete climate action and support.
"2026 was a very difficult year. We had extreme heat and extreme drought and that severely affected the crops", Jean-Claude Muller, president of the Luxembourg Fruit Growers' Association, stated.
While the fruit quality this year was exceptionally good, quantities have not met expectations.
The companies that had plenty of water at their disposal did well, Muller explains, but the harvest for those that did not have water was catastrophic. The apples were simply too small.
The demand of the fruit growers is therefore clear:
We need water. We must be able to provide water so that in the future there will always be water available for irrigation. It may be that next year will be a very wet year. That is why it is also difficult to say that if you want to become more resilient, you have to plant other varieties, because the climate is changing, that is a fact. However, the weather is very difficult to predict. The only thing that is certain is that there will always be long periods when it will either be extremely hot or it may rain for a long time.
The water resilience strategy and clean surface and drinking water is naturally important, but fruit and vegetable growers also have to be able to produce their goods. Therefore, water should be stored so that it can be used in the summer for irrigation, the association says.
On Friday, members of the association visited politicians and RTL headquarters in Kirchberg to present their products and draw attention to their problems. Behind every apple, behind every production, there is a lot of love and know-how, but also many challenges and many problems, especially this year.
In response to the discussion on pesticides used on Luxembourg's apples, which drew attention earlier this year, the association emphasised that their fruit and vegetables are regularly checked by government authorities. But they also perform their own quality control, Muller said:
We've introduced checks ourselves by an independent German institute, because we simply want to produce safe apples, safe pears, and that is why this is very important to us. We do not want to be placed under general suspicion. It's not right, because our fruit growers do a very good job. They are already reducing plant protection products, they are already working with beneficial insects and they are implementing new techniques to become as resilient as possible.
The water resilience strategy states that plant protection products should be completely banned in water protection areas, something that fruit growers do not see as such. However, they are open to dialogue and also to finding solutions to reduce plant protection products, Muller says.
The fact that water quality should be increased is extremely important to the association. However, this would only happen together with all the stakeholders and should not be "dictated from above".
