Potato crisis worsens in Italy: Production is down, and prices are up

Published 2024년 11월 6일

Tridge summary

Potato prices have seen a significant increase due to rising production costs and decreasing production in major European countries like Germany, France, and Spain, with Spain having to halt exports to meet domestic demand. Factors such as climate change, wireworms, and chemical bans have affected production, leading to the loss of 11 thousand hectares of potato cultivation in the last campaign. Heavy rainfall has also caused yields to drop and led to the downgrading or discarding of large quantities of product. The processed food industry, which accounts for over 60% of potato consumption, is a major competitor, with projections showing a potential increase in demand by 70% by 2030. Italy, heavily reliant on seed tuber imports, saw a 33% increase in imports last year.

Disclaimer:The above summary was generated by Tridge's proprietary AI model for informational purposes.

Original content

A must-have commodity on the table, potatoes have also been hit in recent months by waves of price increases that risk undermining their primacy as the “poor man’s food” par excellence. Consumer prices on an annual basis mark, as of September 30, 2024, an increase of 15 cents and skyrocketing production costs. For a country dependent on imports like Italy, extremely worrying signals are coming from Germany and France, marked by sharply declining production and from Spain, forced to eliminate exports to satisfy domestic consumption. The Spanish case has also raised a question: could this be the beginning of a crisis for one of the most loved and “taken for granted” commodities on the table? Climate change, wireworms and (as far as Italy is concerned) the ban on using specific chemical principles, undermine production at its foundations. The raw material is missing: 11 thousand hectares of potato cultivation (Unapa data) have been lost, throughout Europe, in the last campaign alone. ...

Source: Il sole 24 ore