Information for fruit and vegetables business in CIS
The season of greenhouse vegetables starts in Ukraine
As the specialists of AMP (Agricultural Marketing Project) regional offices inform, the growing number of greenhouse vegetables are supplied on market to substitute vegetables grown on the open ground. This situation is caused by frosts which took place in the major Ukrainian regions past week; such thermophilic vegetable crops as tomatoes, egg-plants and pepper were frost-killed.
Despite of the fact that vegetable commodities continue to be supplied on market from the storages, the experts think that tomatoes, egg-plants and pepper can not be stored in such storages longer than 2-4 weeks. In Ukraine you can count on fingers the storages with the modified atmosphere in which the mentioned vegetables can be stored for several months without sufficient quality losses. To the point, the problem of modern storage technologies will be discussed during the First International Conference "Vegetables and Fruits of Ukraine: the Market of New Alternatives" to be held in Kyiv in two weeks.
Despite of dynamic growth of demand for vegetables during the cold months of the year, their production in Ukraine started to increase evidently only in 2003, when production growth rate was 13%. Before, during 5 previous years the production of greenhouse vegetables increased only on 19%. The production growth of vegetables produced under cover takes place mainly because of implementation of new modern greenhouse complexes with high yield per one square meter. This year because of the growing expenses on energy many old greenhouse complexes constructed without energy-saving technologies may turn bankrupts.