The potato campaign is also practically over in Castilla y León. It just remains to start, and with a very bad prospect for commercialization, as Marco Martín, president of Asopocyl, comments. There is product to be released in Segovia. It is also in warehouses.
What is still on the ground are sack varieties, which currently lack a market. With the closed restoration, no one is interested in this tuber. “There is no specific place to sell”, Martín comments.
The balance of the campaign is “more shadows than lights.” The washed varieties have come out well, but the sack varieties have done so “in fits and starts.” All this despite the fact that there has been little production, but a lot of quality.
The prices have not been to get excited either. “The production and the price for sacking has been very low. Those of the washing have not been satisfactory either. “If there had been no pandemic, we would be talking about very good prices. Bad price. It has not been good ”, repeats over and over again the president of Asopocyl.
And uncertainty is what now dominates the sector. There is no way to foresee so much time in advance what the crops will be like for the next season. Here, the coronavirus also has almost everything in its hand.
One of the options so that this year does not repeat itself is to reduce plantings. It is what they are going to do in France, and what they propose from Appacyl, that it be 15% less. The president of this association, Eduardo Arroyo, advocates for the next campaign “to reduce plantings and analyze which potatoes to plant. The fable, for example, this year nobody wants it… ”.
Arroyo’s balance is that the end of the campaign has done “a lot of damage” to the Castilla y León potato grower, and he demands that the interprofessional “get down to work to sell us better.”
Now there are tubers without plucking and others that already are but have no way out. The campaign started with acceptable prices, which in July were between 20 and 22 cents. In August, the lack of consumption of the Horeca channel made those of the laundry drop to between 17 and 18 cents, which were “acceptable”.
In September the potato from the region was no longer washed and the one from France arrived early. The interprofessional, formed only “facing the gallery” has done nothing to solve this: the shelves were supplied by baggers, who only bought French potatoes. October has already been “a disaster, with sunk prices and the market also sunk,” according to Arroyo.
