The summer raspberry season has pleased Ukrainians with affordable prices, but it has become one of the most unprofitable in history for producers. Taras Bashtannik, head of the Ukrainian Horticulture Association (UHA), spoke about this with SEEDS.
“Summer raspberry season is almost over. The season of autumn raspberries is beginning, which will last until the first frosts – somewhere until the end of September. For this year’s raspberries, everyone was shocked by the prices. These were historically low prices; the last time they were this low was in 2017. There were even historical lows; it seems that the price in some regions of Ukraine reached up to 17 UAH per kilogram ($0.46) due to the low quality of raspberries. A good working price for summer raspberries was 30 UAH ($0.81). That barely covers production costs, and even then, not for everyone,” says Taras Bashtannik.
Read also: How the berry season goes in Ukraine – interim results from Taras Bashtannyk
What will be the yield and price of autumn raspberries? The specialist does not even undertake to predict. This isn’t easy due to several factors. “On the one hand, processors buy autumn raspberries more readily because they have the best quality for freezing. On the other hand, the total production of autumn raspberries in Ukraine is 70 percent! If summer varieties are grown 30%, no more, everything else is raspberry autumn varieties. Accordingly, one can imagine a huge amount of total harvest, which now, in the next 2-3 weeks, will rush both to the Ukrainian markets and processing. Here is just the problem. Because there is a suspicion that the price may, at a minimum, not grow or, at a maximum, become even lower. Or fix at the level of 20-25 UAH ($0.54-0.68), which is very, very low price,” says Taras Bashtannik.
