October 24 2006, 13:24

Ukrainian cabbage - for export?

According to the forecasts of the analysts of the Agricultural Marketing Project, Ukraine will get the top record cabbage harvest this year. The harvest will be 10-12% larger than in 2005. Despite of the fact that this September the Agricultural Marketing Project significantly reduced the forecast for gross cabbage production in 2006 (the production growth was expected to be 30-35% earlier), the analysts think the gross harvest of this commodity will still be record comparing to the previous years.

The reliability of the Project forecasts is confirmed by wholesale prices for cabbage which are 20-30% lower now than a year ago in all regions of the country. Moreover, at the present moment an average price for white cabbage is 30-40% lower in Lviv and Ivano-Frankovsk oblasts comparing to the same period of time in 2005. The producers sell cabbage for $0.07-0.09/kg on terms of customers' pick up in these regions.

It is worth to mention that an average wholesale price for cabbage is 10-20% lower in Lviv oblast now than in the neighboring Poland. This fact is rather untypical. According to the yet unconfirmed information, cabbage shipments have been quite actively exported to some EU countries since recently. Earlier Ukraine did not belong to the large cabbage exporters; our country mostly supplied export shipments of early cabbage in May-June. So, this information may be interesting for cabbage market.

At the same time, if the information is confirmed, the cabbage export shipments will hardly be quite large to significantly consolidate inner prices for cabbage. The detailed forecast for cabbage prices in 2007 will be presented during the third international conference "Fruits and Vegetables of Ukraine 2006. Open market". We'll remind that only about 4 weeks are left till the end of participants' registration.