EastFruit analysts draw the attention of horticultural business participants to an attractive potential apple market, about which very little is known due to the incredible level of closedness of this country.
Turkmenistan seems to be gradually starting to “open up” to the world. At least, the international fruit and vegetable trade of Turkmenistan has been growing quite steadily in recent years. We wrote a lot about the very high growth rates of exports of greenhouse tomatoes from Turkmenistan and its pushing out competitors from the Russian market. However, the imports of fruits and vegetables to Turkmenistan also continue to grow.
Despite the lack of a complete picture of trade, since Turkmenistan does not disclose information about its exports and imports, we can indirectly estimate it by assessing exports from Turkmenistan’s supplying countries.
In particular, the imports of apples, currently the main position of the fruit and vegetable import of Turkmenistan, are of particular interest. According to our estimates, Turkmenistan imported about 41 000 tonnes of fresh apples in 2021, which, by the way, is comparable to the total apple exports from Ukraine!
We assessed, that the volume of apple imports to Turkmenistan in 2022 increased by 20-22% and has reached 50 000 tonnes! And this puts Turkmenistan in line with large regional apple importers such as Brazil, Nigeria, Ireland, and Peru.
Therefore, we advise all apple exporters from Eastern Europe, namely suppliers from Moldova, Ukraine, and Poland, to pay attention to this market. In the meantime, it is dominated by apples from Iran, which provides 92% of all supplies. The rest of the imports are almost completely supplied by Turkey. Uzbekistan also supplies small volumes of apples to Turkmenistan, but these are mainly “summer apples” – early varieties ripening in Uzbekistan in May-July.
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