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The demand for berries — a food full of vitamins, minerals and antioxidants — is on the rise globally, and Ukraine is becoming an increasingly important player on the market for these delicious fruits.
This is especially clear from the country’s berry exports to the European Union, African countries and China. During the past five years, Ukraine has increased its exports of frozen berries — mainly blueberries, raspberries, strawberries, lingonberries, and currants — threefold to export 47,803 tons in 2018.
Exports of fresh berries have grown even more noticeably — up to 5,972 tons, or tenfold, during the same period. Top destinations of Ukrainian berries are Poland, Belarus, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom.
“Berry production is a very strong trend today. On average, the berry trade is growing at 6.2 percent a year globally,” said Andriy Yarmak, investment officer at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.
According to Tom Joyce, a fruit market expert at London-based Fruitnet Media International, every other year Asia is adding as many berries as Germany produces in one year. The market “is still a small share of the global market, but it is increasing very quickly,” said Joyce.
In 2018, Ukrainian exporters earned $78.2 million from selling frozen berries and $8.2 million from fresh berries.
But those figures could be much higher.
Ukraine loses around $24 million in exports annually due to poor marketing, underdeveloped services, and much lower prices for berries compared to EU countries, according to Yarmak.
“Many producers have a ‘kolkhoz’ (collective farm) mentality — their main goal is to produce more. In fact, it is more profitable to produce less but with high quality, and sell at a higher price,” said Yarmak.
In total, Ukraine produced some 132,900 tons of berries last year, according to the Ministry of Agrarian Policy and Food of Ukraine. Strawberries made up almost half of the crop, followed by raspberries with a 17-percent share and currants with a 22-percent share.
Ukraine’s exports of fresh and frozen berries have increased since 2014. Fresh cherries, as well as fresh and frozen raspberries and currants, had the most significant growth.
Source: APK-Inform: Vegetables and Fruits
Stumbling blocks
In addition to a lack of management skills, Ukrainian farmers are struggling to find labor.
This is not a new problem for Ukraine, but it is getting worse, according to Oleksandr Khorev, head of the Fruit-Inform online agricultural platform.
“If earlier we talked only about the lack of berry pickers, now Ukraine has problems with skilled workers, like agronomists and technicians. This problem is growing,” he said.
Today, many firms are ready to increase last year’s salaries by 20 percent, but this salary boost can hardly solve the problem for the next few years, he said.
For some companies, the trend is more optimistic. In Vesna‑2011, a 500- hectare berry cluster with 17 small farmer enterprises located some 65 kilometers west of Kyiv, many families come from western Ukraine to work as berry pickers.
“People from western Ukraine say that currently Ukrainians are treated in Poland as animals — no hot water and they are not fed there. Some of them thought: why should they go to Poland if they can earn the same money here,” said Lesya Bernadska, director of campus for workers at Vesna‑2011.
According to Bernadska, berry pickers can earn up to Hr 1,500 per day, or $56. For this, they have to pick 130 kilograms of strawberries.
Another serious issue is the required quality of berries sold on the global market — for example, the standards for sweet cherries exported to China.
“Currently foreign markets do not (consume) the berries that we have in Zaporizhia Oblast. It cannot all be collected and sold. There are requirements for color, the presence of a stalk on each sweet cherry,” said Khorev. “In China, they offer very good prices but we cannot export (the needed) volumes yet.”
Even though Ukraine could export large amounts of cherries to China, due to strict requirements Ukrainian farmers still do not have access to the market. Today, Ukraine mainly exports its berries to Belarus, much of which is then re-exported to Russia.
Exports to Belarus, however, are expected to grow as Ukraine uses updated technology for new gardens of sweet cherries, according to Khorev.
On the other hand, there is a high likelihood that the production of raspberries will decrease because of a deficit of freezing technologies as well as a lack of markets for fresh berry exports.
According to Oleg Bosiy, managing partner at FruiTech, almost all Ukrainian producers of raspberries are focused on the processing market.
“The raspberry is the most expensive product on the market. In the U.S., in Europe and it is supposed to be the same in Ukraine,” said Bosiy. “But growing raspberries require serious technology, special breeds, protection. Ukrainian producers still cannot afford such investments.”
Of the 1,000 tons of fresh raspberries exported from Ukraine to Poland last year, most were intended for processing into a puree concentrate, as these berries had the lowest quality.
But unlike the negative forecast for the raspberry market, the demand for blueberries is growing.
Only since 2017 has Ukraine’s government recognized the blueberry as a commercial berry. During the past 12 years, the berry has evolved from a little-known niche product to one of the main berries that Ukraine exports.
In 2018, around 2,000 tons of Ukrainian blueberries were exported to the U.K., Netherlands, and Belarus. The highest price for exported blueberries was in the U.K. — around $6 per kilogram.
“The blueberry is the only berry that is truly exported fresh from Ukraine and I don’t expect to see any changes in the next few years,” said Bosiy.
Ukraine is currently one of the top five countries in Europe with the biggest territory dedicated to blueberry farming, according to Bosiy. And in the next three to five years, an additional 400–600 hectares will be added annually.
“If we look at blueberries, the market is increasing rapidly even in the U.K., where blueberries are very popular and yet we see that” there is still much room for growth.
“So, there is still room for growth in countries, where blueberries are as popular as in the U. K. This means that the market will grow,” he said.
Bosiy forecasts that Ukraine will produce some 4,700 tons of blueberries this year. However, only seven companies which operate 30 percent of the blueberry farming in Ukraine have the Global Good Agricultural Practice (Global GAP) food safety standard qualification, a “must have” to be able to export to EU countries.
Global GAP and legal issues
Getting Global GAP is not that easy.
According to Igor Chechitko, a Global GAP expert, there are many strict requirements that berry producers must follow in order to receive it.
For example, in Ukraine, there is a list of officially approved plant protection products that are not allowed in the EU. And purchases of plant protection products must be legally proven.
In addition, Ukrainian certification is often not trusted abroad.
Poland or Germany do their own analysis instead, said Chechitko.
Despite the presence of laboratories in Ukraine, the auditor may have questions for the farmer about the adequacy of the analyses done in these labs, which test for at least 200 active substances that are banned in EU.
“Usually, 400–450 active substances are tested there (in Germany),” said Chechitko.
It is also quite expensive to get a Global GAP. According to Yanina Suarishvili, financial director at Vesna‑2011, it can cost thousands of euros to receive the certification and needs to be redone every year.
