April 16 2015, 16:12 Fito-Mag

Ukraine: re-exports of Polish apples to surpass the wildest expectations

The Ukrainian apple market has been developing under fully nonstandard scenario in the current market. Despite record high domestic production, Ukraine has imported rather significant volumes of apples. In that case, the supply must have grown in the internal market, which would have only lead to the price collapse. However, the situation was quite the opposite.

The market analysts estimate Ukrainian apple production to reach 1.3 mln tons in 2014, an increase of 7% year-on-year. In addition to domestically grown apples, Ukraine is expected to purchase no lower than 120,000 tons of apples in the current season, the highest imports over the past 5 years and 4 times as high as a year before. The question naturally suggests itself: why have apple prices almost tripled year-on-year under conditions of record high supply?

The market experts explain it simply: the reason of such an inconsistence is in large volumes of re-exports. Analysts estimate Ukraine to ship about 90,000 tons of Polish apples to Russia through Crimea in the current season, while internal consumption of imported apples will be lower year-on-year. Due to high prices of imported produce resulted from the devaluation of the national currency, Ukraine will consume about 25,000-30,000 tons of imported apples, one of the lowest levels over the whole history of independent Ukraine.