The 2015/2016 season has been one of the worst in the last ten years for Spain's cucumber growers, with even lower prices than those obtained in the season of the E. coli bacteria crisis in Germany, but which caused a severe crisis all the same.
This has been the conclusion reached after looking at the data supplied by the Prices and Markets Observatory of Andalusia's Council of Agriculture, Fisheries and Rural Development regarding prices at origin, i.e., those paid to growers for the Class I product.
Although the production volume this campaign has been greater than that of the previous one, 438.87 million kilos this season compared with 425.21 million kilos in the previous one, producers have made 11.6 million Euro less than in the 2015/2016 campaign. With the average prices supplied by the Observatory, the total revenue generated has dropped from 195.92 million to 184.32 million Euro.
By varieties
As for the average prices obtained by each cucumber variety, long cucumbers, known as Almeria or Dutch cucumbers, have dropped by 4.44 percent, from 0.45 Euro per kilo last season to 0.43 this campaign.
Meanwhile, French cucumbers have dropped from 0.55 €/kilo in the previous year to 0.39 in the current campaign (-29.09%).
Lastly, the average price for Class I short cucumbers has dropped from 0.53 Euro per kilo in the 2014/2015 campaign to 0.36 €/kg in the 2015/2016 season (-32.07%).
Source: hortoinfo.es