April 4 2007, 10:22

Ukraine: cucumber and tomato seeds are sold extremely poor

The seed companies inform the analysts of ""Agrooglyad: Vegetables and Fruits" journal" that the demand for tomato and cucumber seeds has been and still is record low.

To the specialists' opinion, the declining demand for tomato seeds relates to the reduced plans to purchase tomato for processing by many canneries, and also enterprises - producers of tomato juice, tomato paste and ketchup. Considering the prices on the world market of tomato paste, many of the enterprises would rather import tomato paste from China. Talking about canneries, they accumulated too much canned tomato products past year: the canneries have not sell everything till this moment.

The same reasons led to the declining sales of cucumber seeds. Primarily, many farmers refuse even talking about this crop, as they failed to sell any volumes of cucumber past year. Low prices for this crop past season also frighten off many new-comers who wanted to try growing cucumbers. According to evaluations of some analysts, canneries will sell the products canned in 2006 till the season 2008; this year the canneries will reduce the volumes of cucumber purchase till the minimum.

You can find the details of the changes in cucumber and tomato cultivation areas in 2007 from "The production and price forecast for fruits and vegetables 2007"; the forecast will be available in two weeks for the price of 2,200 UAH ($440). The subscribers of "Agrooglyad: Vegetables and Fruits" journal will obtain the full version of the survey for the discount price of 2,000 ($400). Please send the application to purchase the full version of the survey to Maxim Yenchenko, [email protected].