Forecast by EastFruit 15 Feb
The period of mass sales of seeds for sowing early vegetables has ended in Moldova. Managers of enterprises importing seedlings for agricultural production note that farmers purchased about 30% of onion seeds more than last year. According to expert estimates, no more than 2 000-2 500 ha were planted with onions in the country in 2022.
Onion sowing will start in March, as soon as weather conditions permit, and will end in the same month. The projected area of plantations is unlikely to change significantly in the short time left before the sowing. Obviously, despite the sharp rise in the price of onions in the region and all over the world, there will be no huge expansion of the areas sown with onions of the new crop in Moldova. The area of onion fields will just recover to the level of 2020 when it was significantly reduced under the pressure of low prices in the domestic market of the country.
The expected increase in onion sowing for the 2023 harvest does not guarantee that the Moldovan fruit and vegetable market will be sufficiently supplied with local onions in the next marketing year, EastFruit analysts believe. Even if the new onion crop in Moldova is good, it is likely that neighboring Ukraine will consume all these Moldovan products offered for export. Just like it happened in 2022. Since Ukrainian import traders will have to compensate for the loss of most of the marketable onions supplied to the domestic market of the country by vegetable growers of the Kherson and Mykolaiv regions, where onions used to be grown on an area of about 30 000 ha before the war.
EastFruit