Cucumbers under the pressure of imports.

The season of trading in domestic greenhouse cucumbers in large quantities is already in its final phase. In small quantities, these vegetables will still be available in winter, but the market will be significantly dominated by imports. And how does the pricing situation look in this segment of the vegetable market? It is actually imports that are currently the number one topic when it comes to the greenhouse cucumber market in Poland. Our domestic cucumbers are constantly under pressure from the relatively low prices of foreign offers. And it's not just about Russian cucumbers, which arouse so much controversy among participants in the Polish market (both for quality reasons and for the fact that Russian cucumbers can be imported to Poland while Polish cucumbers cannot be exported to Russia) and which are characterized by low prices. Even this season, the offer of Spanish cucumbers is very competitive in terms of pricing. We can see this in our first chart. The average price of cucumbers in the 43rd week of this year in Spain was 0.52 euro/kg. As we can see, it was much lower than last year (-43 percent) and lower than two years ago (-12 percent). The pressure of relatively cheap imported cucumbers is clearly felt in the Polish wholesale market. The selling prices of Spanish cucumbers in wholesale trade on a larger scale range from 4.00 to 5.50 PLN/kg. This pressure was significant enough that around October 25th, the current average price of Polish cucumbers in large quantities fell below the average price of the previous 5 seasons (5.50 PLN/kg compared to 5.55 PLN/kg). However, now, before the long holiday weekend, the prices of domestic cucumbers managed to recover. And to the extent that we can see on the second chart, the current price not only rose above the long-term average but is also higher than the prices from all 5 seasons. The selling prices of Polish cucumbers are now mostly 6.00-8.00 PLN/kg. The question is, what will happen after the long weekend? It seems that unless the pricing realities of imports change, there won't be a repeat of the expensive end of November that we saw last year (with an average price of 10.00 PLN/kg).