Poland: future of fruit production

Warsaw - Polish fruit growers, researchers and scientists met in December last year in Lublin at the international conference called „Future of fruit growing in Poland”. According to professor Eberhard Makosz, a well known Polish fruit expert, scientist and President of “The Association for the Development of Stunted Orchards”, sweet cherries, plums, pears and strawberries will be one of the most profitable fruit crops in Poland during next few years.

Why not apples? Because Poland produces about 2 million MT of them already, but only 15-20% of fruits (300-400 thousands MT) can be considered as table apples according to EU standards. Many farmers start to grow apples, because of the low profitability of agricultural production. There is a chance that because of those “newcomers” apple crop in Poland can exceed 4 million MT in future. So many apples will cause significant troubles with marketing, especially when we consider that fruit export from Poland is not well organized yet, Russian embargo on fresh produce from Poland (implemented more than a year ago) is still in force and finally apple consumption in Poland (as well as in other EU countries) stagnates.

As mentioned above, the most profitable crops will be sweet cherries, strawberries, plums and pears, but not all varieties. Demand for sweet cherries grows and this trend will continue, but only for varieties with large fruits, which are more then two times expensive in Poland than small ones. In case of strawberries it is worth to develop production of table fruits only, specially strawberries for export (same with sweet cherries), since actual situation in processing market is difficult.

Pear production can also be profitable because acreage of pear orchards in Poland is still low and buyers from Eastern Europe are interested in fruit.
Source:freshplaza.com