The NBU has significantly revised its potato and vegetable production figures for 2026

The National Bank of Ukraine has significantly revised downwards its forecast for potato and vegetable production in 2026, as stated in the regulator’s Inflation Report for October 2026. According to the updated estimates, the potato harvest will fall to 12.89 million tonnes and the vegetable harvest to 7 million tonnes, whilst fruit and berry production is expected to reach 1.77 million tonnes.

According to analysts at the Experts Club information and analysis centre, the combined decline in production across these two main categories of crop farming will amount to around 4.69 million tonnes compared with 2025 figures, posing new challenges for the agricultural sector and consumer inflation.

Trends in the decline in potato and vegetable production

The regulator has made the most significant adjustments to the figures for potatoes: the previously forecast volume of 16.40 million tonnes has been reduced by 21.4 per cent (or 3.51 million tonnes). Compared with 2025 (16.38 million tonnes), the reduction will amount to 21.3 per cent, whilst compared with the pre-war year of 2021 (21.36 million tonnes), the harvest will fall by almost 40 per cent. In the vegetable sector, the forecast has been reduced from 8 million to 7 million tonnes (12.5 per cent lower than the previous estimate and 14.6 per cent lower than in 2025).

At the same time, the Ministry of Agrarian Policy and Food notes that no physical shortage of potatoes is expected in the country: annual domestic consumption by the population stands at 2–2.5 million tonnes, which is fully covered by the expected harvest. The main focus is on the quality of marketable produce, as the market is supplied by around 400 specialised farms covering an area of 60,000 hectares, whilst the remainder is grown by households for their own consumption.

Long-term risks, inflation and the agricultural sector’s investment needs

The NBU’s revised estimates also covered 2027: the forecast for the potato harvest has been reduced from 16.78 million to 13.48 million tonnes, and that for vegetables from 8.1 million to 7.4 million tonnes. In its macroeconomic forecast, the regulator anticipates that headline inflation will accelerate to 12.5 per cent by the end of 2026, followed by a slowdown to 7.3 per cent in 2027. At the same time, retail prices for fruit and vegetables follow their own seasonal trends and depend on logistics, storage costs and imports.

Maksym Urakin, founder of Experts Club and a candidate of economic sciences, emphasises that the main challenge for the agricultural sector is to increase productivity and reduce losses during storage. The key areas for investment should be the development of irrigation systems, the modernisation of greenhouse operations, the construction of energy-efficient vegetable storage facilities with microclimate control, and the expansion of processing capacity.

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