Apple market suffers from overproduction and price pressure

Right now in Europe there is talk of an enormous price decline in apples. Agricultural economists from the international network agri benchmark Horticulture discussed the situation at length during their second conference in September in Northern Italy, reports the German website Proplanta.de.

While Italian apple growers have been able to get normal kilo prices for their apples (between 35 and 45 cents) in the last few years, this year they only reached 13 cents per kilo for Gala apples and 28 cents per kilo for Golden Delicious apples. Participants from Germany also reported drastically low growers prices for apples, even though the price level lies a bit higher here.

The cause of the decline is mainly due to the high increase in production in Europe; it has increased from 11 million tons to circa 12 millions tons now. The situations has worsened due to the ban from Russia, which affected Polish growers in particular. Normally Poland exports 700,000 tons of apples per year to Russia, now they are looking for new markets.

This year the goal of the conference, for the young network, was to compare the production-, systems-, methods-, and -costs for the crops of apples, tomatoes and wine grapes, and to identify the factors influencing the timing of crops.