In the 2023 season, the price of blueberries was lower than the previous year.
Accordingly, the profitability of plantations was expected to be lower as well, but that’s not the case. The reason is that many Ukrainian producers are only now reaching full productivity on their blueberry plantations, leading to an annual increase in production volumes. As the volume of blueberry harvests rises, the operational cost of cultivation generally decreases, as noted by analysts at east-fruit.com.
However, there’s another factor to consider – inflation. While it was previously overlooked, it’s now impossible to ignore.
Annual inflation for the dollar and euro was around 1% or lower until 2021, so it could be disregarded during analysis. However, in 2021, dollar inflation surged to 4.7%, and in 2022, it skyrocketed to an astonishing 8%. The situation with the euro was no better: inflation reached 2.55% in 2021 and 8.83% in 2022.
What does this mean in real figures? If we take the average wholesale price of higher-grade blueberries in Ukraine for the 2023 season, which was $4.7 USD per kg, and remove the inflation indicators from the prices of the last two years, it would be approximately $4.1 USD per kg in 2021 prices. Remember, in 2021, the average wholesale price of blueberries in Ukraine was $5.9 USD per kg.
So, how much has the real price of blueberries fallen in Ukraine over two years? The nominal price decreased by less than 20%, but the comparative, or real price, dropped by a significant 30%! This means that the real income of blueberry producers in Ukraine has indeed decreased.
“And this is without taking into account all the difficulties that Ukrainian farmers have faced in the conditions of war. Now it’s even physically challenging to find enough people to harvest blueberries, not to mention the rapid increase in labor costs. There’s also a huge shortage of qualified specialists, agronomists, engineers, and so on. Unfortunately, these problems may become even more pronounced in the near future,” write the analysts.
Source: Jagodnik