TIRANA, Feb. 8 – The first local strawberries are already tapping local and international markets for this year as more and more farmers and businesses in the southern region of Fier, known as the breadbasket of Albania’s agriculture, have discovered strawberry cultivation as their new success story.
Currently selling at about 500 lek (€3.7) a kg, strawberry prices are expected to undergo a sharp decline and drop to as low as €1.5/kg as the peak production stage nears in the next few months, meeting domestic market needs but also exporting a small part of production to neighbouring countries, mainly Kosovo.
Strawberry production was quite limited until five years ago when the first massive cultivation began by farmers who had mainly worked in neighboring Greece and Italy.
The Kafaraj village in Fier has also been nicknamed ‘the strawberry village” due to the massive greenhouse strawberry cultivation in the past few years.
This year’s production is set to be one of worst for the Karafaj farmers as they had their greenhouses damaged twice by floods in the past couple of months due to the local Vjosa River overtopped its banks.
However, dozens of other villages in Fier and Lushnja have high expectations about this year’s production.
One of the many many Italian entrepreneurs in Albania, Adriano Mazza found a “strawberry paradise land” in in the village of Grabian, Lushnje. He tried almost 14 varieties of strawberries, of which two had the highest yield and production is mainly destined for export.
“Strawberries are a smart investment in Albania, as they have 3 months production season far better than in some other countries where the production season lasts only 15 days. Albania’s sea position in the West makes the climate very favourable for this fruit,” Mazza has told the Agroweb portal.
Albania’s average yield of strawberry increased to 55 to 60 metric tons per hectare in 2017, up from an initial 40 to 50 metric tons in the early 2010s when large-scale cultivation began, says USAID Albania. The U.S. Agency for International Development has been assisting Fier farmers with alternative strawberry varieties to enable earlier harvest and shift production toward earlier, more profitable market windows as well as nutrition systems to improve the quality and food safety of strawberries.
In addition to dozens of farmer entrepreneurs and local pickers, an agriculture company run by one of the country’s richest man is also engaged in strawberry cultivation in Lushnje through tunnel greenhouses among other fruit and vegetables it cultivates.
SuperBerry Albania, a Fier-based Dutch-Albanian joint venture has been exporting berries to the Netherlands since late 2015 after it launched a new packing facility.
Albania’s strawberry production relies on the Camarosa variety to a large extent and other short-day strawberry varieties including Sabrina, Fortuna, Nabila, Oso Grande, Splendor, and Miranda.
Experts say Albania has the ideal climate to grow berries, that can be harvested twice a year rather than once, providing for ‘out of season’ raspberries.
The southwestern Albanian region of Fier, known as the breadbasket of Albania’s agriculture, produces about a third of total vegetables and a quarter of the country’s field crops, making agriculture in this region a key sector in addition to its oil industry which has slowed down in the past three years due to a slump in international oil prices.
Agriculture is one of the main sectors of the Albanian economy, employing about half of the country’s population but producing only about a fifth of the country’s GDP, unveiling its poor productivity and huge untapped potential hampered by the fragmentation of land into small plots, poor credit and lack of subsidies.
