OREANDA-NEWS. October 16, 2014. In July-September 2013 Moldova did not supply apples to Ukraine at all, APC-Inform Vegetables&Fruit states. According to the experts, as an apple importer, Ukraine keeps beating its own records.

 This September it imported 3,000 tonnes, which was 22 times as much as last September and the biggest amount ever since Ukraine’s independence. In July-September, Ukraine imported 8,000 apples, fivefold against the same period of the past year. In the reporting period, Moldova was the major importer of apples to Ukraine, its share making about 56% on the Ukrainian market of imported apples. About 40% were imported from Poland, which increased its presence in the Ukrainian market 2.6 times.

The growth in the apple imports in Ukraine roots into a decline in the reference prices for apples in the country, the experts suppose. Due to the ban on the supply of European and Moldovan apples to Russia the apple prices in Poland and Moldova have reduced considerably year-on-year. As a result, Moldovan and Polish apples have become rather competitive in the Ukrainian market. As InfoMarket said earlier, Director of Rosselkhoznadzor Sergey Dankvert noted Ukraine had been suspected of re-exporting Moldovan apples and a ban could be placed on deliveries of apples from Ukraine to Russia.

According to him, Rosselkhoznadzor officers often find breaches of phyto-sanitary norms in batches of apples and grapes supplied from Ukraine to Russia and it is possible that the fruits liable to quarantine have been re-exported from Moldova.