If 10 days ago at wholesale markets of the capital and district centers of Moldova traders agreed to pay farmers for onions of “store quality” about 3.6-3.8 lei/kg, at the beginning of the current week the level of “demand prices” fell to 2.8 lei/kg on average.
Judging by the EastFruit price monitoring data, this is already much lower than the average price at the end of September for the last three years (about 5 lei/kg). However, in Moldova the price is still comparable to the price of Polish onions, but one third higher than in neighboring Ukraine (in terms of Moldovan currency – about 1.8 lei/kg).
Operators of the country’s fruit and vegetable market are afraid of an unpleasant variant of the situation, that onions may become even cheaper. The reason is the excessive supply of this commodity by local farms. The problem is that Moldova grows comparatively few onions of those varieties that can be stored for a long time. And there are not many high-tech vegetable storages in the country.
Meanwhile, Moldova has a large onion crop. Vegetable growers claim that there are dozens of large farms in the country, where the yield of good quality onions exceeds 100 tons/ha. Despite the fact that seed suppliers estimate that the total area of onion plantations in Moldova has fallen below 1,000 hectares, the harvested onions will be enough to fully supply the domestic market until mid-spring. Then, most likely, local traders will have to import onions, mainly from Ukraine.
