With 21.2% of the European Union (EU-27) total potato harvest in 2020 (or 11.7m tonnes), Germany is now officially the largest producer, followed by Poland (16.4%), France (15.7%), the Netherlands (12.7%) and Belgium (7.2%).
These top five potato producers from EU-27 accounted for 73.1% of the block’s total EU harvest (55,3m tonnes), last year. Also, they’ve accounted for a slightly smaller majority (66.8 % in 2020) of the area planted to potatoes in the EU, with Romania accounting for an additional 10.0% (4,9% out of the total potato production).
Besides exporting and trading raw potatoes for food and seeds, EU also processes its potatoes into four main types of products, frozen potatoes (mainly fries), prepared or preserved potatoes (mostly crisps), dried potatoes, and potato starch.
Potatoes worth EUR 12 billion to EU farming
The value at basic prices (i.e. including subsidies, but excluding taxes on products) of the raw potatoes (including seed potatoes) produced across the EU-27 in 2020 was an estimated EUR12.3bn. This represented 3.1% of the value of the block’s total agricultural output in 2020, a proportion that varied among Member States from an estimated 6.8% in Romania, down to 0.7% in Luxembourg.
A small majority (57.2 %) of the estimated value of potato production in 2020 came from just three Member States: France (27.7 %), Germany (19.0 %) and the Netherlands (10.5 %).
The overall value of EU processed potato production reached EUR9.1bn in 2019, or 1.6% of the value of production of the whole European food industry. Frozen chips and crisps were the most significant potato products in terms of production value.
