Current potato prices in Russia take just a third of those levels registered in the mid-February 2015, according to Fruit-Inform daily price monitoring.
For the present, farmers from main producing regions are ready to ship at RUB 6-8/kg (USD 0.07-0.11/kg), and prices of nonstandard produce do not exceed RUB 5/kg (USD 0.06/kg). For comparison, last year growers were uninterested in selling high-quality potatoes at lower than RUB 18/kg (USD 0.28/kg), and prices of nonstandard produce stood at RUB 14/kg.
The market participants say that potatoes are still in the lowest demand among all fruit and vegetable categories in Russia despite a significant year-on-year fall in prices. The situation is aggravated by abundant supply of produce. Under those conditions, some farms are ready to make further price concessions to intensify their trading activity, and many growers’ prices have already fallen below breakeven point.
Moreover, farmers say of still large stocks of potatoes with some of them having managed to sell lower than a half of their volumes in storage.