The first shipment of Tongan squash for 2006 to Japan and a new market Korea will leave Nuku'alofa next week with 2,300 tonnes of squash.

Tevita Toafa, the Manager of FIMCO, one of the exporters, said they were scheduling the first shipment of Tongan squash to leave either on October 11 or 12.

Tevita said his company would ship 300 tonnes in the first shipment and about 1,000 tonnes in its total exports for the season; while the other 14 exporters will make the rest of the tonnage.

The harvesting of this year's squash began last week and will run until November and there will be two shipping companies used for the exports this year.

Tevita said that the Korean market had established their price of USD .75 cents per kilo of baby squash.

The Tonga Squash Council had already confirmed in August that they would be exporting 2,200 tonnes of baby squash to the Korean market where they are expecting to generate $3.4 million pa'anga in export value.

This announcement comes after the council reached agreements with four main squash importers in Korea for Tonga to export a total of 2,200 metric tones of baby squash between 0.9 kilograms to 1.2 kilograms in this arrangement. But as for the Japanese market no price has been set.

Tevita said that Japan had recently put new restrictions on the acceptable level of chemicals growers may use on their squash, so they will want to examine the squash upon arrival and the price for the Japanese squash might be set after the first shipment arrives there.

He added that they had not confirmed how much actual tonnage will be exported this season but judging from the squash harvest done so far there is a low production considering the fact that diseases have affected the majority of the squash.

Tonga exported a total of 12,560 tonnes of squash to Japan during the season of October-November 2005.