It seems that Ukrainian vegetable growers are experiencing serious problems with the sale of onion stocks from their 2020 harvest.
It has become clear that these stocks will never be sold, and will have to be trashed. Right now, there are still a lot of offers of last year’s onions on the market, which have been stored from August 2020 to the present day, manually sorted and calibrated. Ukrainian farmers are ready to sell such onions of almost perfect quality at 3-4 UAH/kg (11-15 US cents). Small onions of caliber 3-5 cost only about 1,5 UAH or less than 6 US cents per kg!
For comparison, at the same time in 2020 last year’s onions in Ukraine were sold at 11 UAH/kg, i.e. on average, 3-4 times more expensive, and in 2019 the prices at the end of the selling season reached 15 UAH/kg, and at the beginning of May 2019 a record wholesale selling price of onions for all years was set at 33 UAH/kg.
“In Ukraine, any onion-production project will be doomed to periodic large losses if it does not initially plan to export a significant part of its products. Even if prices on the domestic market turn out to be higher than in export markets, such a project should maintain contacts with buyers and sell part of the products for export. Only in this case one can say it is a sustainable vegetable business and development,“ a FAO economist told east-fruit.com.
