After its recent Potato Sector meeting, Asociafruit (Association of Fruit and Vegetable Producing and Exporting Companies of Andalusia) announced that the early new potato planting campaign has ended with a sown area similar to last year’s one.
The Asociafruit experts have been able to verify, based on the seed import data, that the Cartagena and Western Andalusia autonomous communities’ local growers are facing a potato sowing campaign that will count around 10,500 hectares. The Asociafruit’s conclusion is based on the available export data of Dutch potato seeds to these regions – which represent around 85% of the total area sown – and those of French seeds.
“The sector attends with great concern and uncertainty to the consequences of the current political and economic context. On the one hand, it is suffering – like the entire rural environment – the consequences of the generalized rise in prices in all the inputs necessary for production, handling, and transport. On the other hand, the possible effects of the current war in Ukraine are still to be counted as indirect consequences on the market and the marketing year. The diversion of production from competing countries such as Egypt, a regular supplier to the Russian market, to the European market due to the devaluation of the ruble, could have disastrous consequences on the marketing year of the early new potato, which has one of its main destinations in the EU markets,” the Asociafruit Potato Sector’s experts.
To analyze the situation of the sector and promote the consumption of the Spanish new potato, Asociafruit will hold the Fifth Congress of the New Potato of Spain, an event that will take place on April 28 in the city of Seville. This Congress will be co-organized with FEPEX (Spanish Federation of Associations of Exporting Producers of Fruits, Vegetables, Flowers, and Live Plants) and has the support for its organization of the Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock, Fisheries and Sustainable Development of the Junta de Andalucía.
Under the title “The sustainability of potato cultivation in the face of new regulatory and market requirements”, the event is expected to be attended by professionals from the sector from all producing areas of Spain. Once Congress ends, an act of promotion of the new potato will take place in Nao Victoria, where the symbolic peeling of the first potato of the campaign will be carried out.
Asociafruit brings together 75% of the potato producing and marketing companies in Andalusia, representing more than 90% of potato shipments from the Andalusian community to EU and non-EU countries.
