Vegetable prices are expected to experience a slight increase leading up to the winter period, but First Deputy Minister of Agrarian Policy and Food, Taras Vysotskyi, assures that there won't be any record price jumps in the fall or winter. Vysotskyi believes that the ample production volumes of onions, cabbage, and other vegetables indicate that record prices are no longer a concern. The stocks of vegetables for borscht significantly exceed this year's demand.
However, there is some consumer inflation associated with storage costs, and the instability in the currency market forces producers to factor in specific risks in the cost of production.
The harvesting of vegetables has concluded in the regions located near the front line.
In the de-occupied Kherson region, only 30% of farmers are currently operational, while on the left bank, enterprises have been bombed and looted. Despite these challenges, farmers in Kherson managed to cultivate and harvest over 87,000 tons of vegetables.
In the Kharkiv region, with a total arable land of 1,932.4 thousand hectares, fieldwork was carried out on 61% of the area in 2023, despite war-related risks. The gross harvest of vegetable crops this year amounted to 340.8 thousand tons, marking a 50.3% increase compared to 2022, and potatoes reached 535.5 thousand tons, a 59.3% increase.
The vegetable harvest in the Odessa region totalled 233.1 thousand tons, including 14.8 thousand tons of cabbage, 18.9 thousand tons of cucumbers, 99.8 thousand tons of tomatoes, 48.1 thousand tons of onions, 7.3 thousand tons of carrots, 9.1 thousand tons of table beets, and 22 thousand tons of pumpkin crops. Also, 273.5 thousand tons harvest of potatoes.
In the Dnipropetrovsk region, farmers harvested over 600 thousand tons of potatoes and more than 780 thousand tons of other vegetables. They also dug up more than 94 thousand tons of beets, nearly 140 thousand tons of onions, 120 tons of carrots, and almost 64 thousand tons of pumpkins. The cabbage harvest, totalling 150 thousand tons, is still ongoing.
In the Chernihiv region, the potato-vegetable group accounted for 6.5% of all sown areas. A total of 1,156.0 thousand tons of potatoes were harvested, marking a 1.3% increase from the previous year. The vegetable harvest amounted to 226.7 thousand tons, a 14.6% increase from the previous year.
source: focus.ua / adm.dp.gov.ua / odesa.novyny