Information for fruit and vegetables business in CIS
Strawberry export from Spain and Poland will decrease in 2006
Poland and Spain are the largest strawberry producers in Europe, that's why the interest to the prognoses for these countries' market development is traditionally high. Two countries produce about one quarter of gross world strawberry production; they influence European and world strawberry market very much. If we consider official statistics, Poland produces five times more strawberry than Ukraine, Spain - 9 times.
World produce market operators have been worried recently by the prognosed abrupt strawberry production decrease in Poland. On this background the messages from Spain, informing about strawberry production decrease here too, seem to provoke positive price expectations on this market next year. Now USDA forecasts 4% decrease of strawberry production in Spain in 2006. It's hard to say anything about changing strawberry production in Poland; but we can suppose that it will decrease more than 10%. As a result of production decrease, export from these two countries is expected to be shortened too. We'll point out that strawberry production and export from Italy have been decreasing for many years already.
At the same time, strawberry production in Ukraine has started to develop recently, thanks to production transfer from houseplots to farms. Still, this process is not widely observed; technologies and varieties used by Ukrainian farmers are out-of-date and non-competitive globally. Maybe that's why Ukrainian share is miserable in world strawberry market, despite of the excellent conditions for this crop production. Nearly all produced strawberry is consumed on the inner market. The other problem is lack of post harvest handling technologies. The questions of fruit and vegetable post harvest handling, and new interesting investment opportunities on produce market will be in main focus during the second international conference "Fruits and Vegetables of Ukraine 2005". The leading experts of produce business from Ukraine, USA, Netherlands, Poland, Russia and other countries will take part in the event. The conference will coincide with the international produce exhibition, where you can see by your own eyes all the technologies referred to during the conference.