April 21 2006, 11:27

This season can cause problems early potato producers in Zakarpattya

Zakarpattya farmers started planting potato to the open ground a month later than usual, Roman Salo, the Zakarpattya office Coordinator, Agricultural Marketing Project, informed "Agrooglyad: Vegetables and Fruits" weekly journal.

Zakarpattya is one of the main early potato producers in the country due to its climatic conditions. But, this season the region failed to avoid cold weather and excessive rainfalls; local farmers could not plant early potato to the open ground in the usual terms. The harvesting season will be delayed for the nearly same period of time. Farmers will have potato not earlier than early June; first shipments of early potato are traditionally supplied on markets in the second half of May.

Still, the planting of medium potato varieties proceeds in the usual terms. Taking into consideration this fact, we can suppose the sales period for early potatoes on increased, "early" prices will be reduced nearly to one month. So, early potato producers will earn significantly less profit.

And, early potato producers will hardly get the same high price for their produce as in the previous years. The decreased import tax for early potato has been in action in Ukraine since 2005; the importer companies have been able to saturate the market with the relatively inexpensive early produce of Egypt origin. The decreased tax will be in action till May 15th. We assume that the importers have created some potato stocks in Ukraine. So it will compete to the national product till the first shipments of inexpensive medium potato enter the market.