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In addition to the insufficient quantity, the wheat in Kosovo, provided by this year’s harvest-threshing season, will not even have the proper quality.
Bashkim Zejnullahu, chairman of the Kosovo Millers’ Association, says that the current quality of wheat does not guarantee the processing of all flour products.
“When we say what the wheat lacks, maybe it’s too early to talk before the harvest-threshing campaign is finished… It doesn’t lack much, but it won’t give enough quality to be processed. For bread processing, it probably won’t be a problem, because for bread we constantly import wheat, as a quality enhancer… But, for some other food industries, it will be a problem”, says Zejnullahu for Radio Free Europe.
He mentions cookies, pastries, pie crusts as products that can suffer from poorer wheat quality.
The producers themselves are also dissatisfied with the quality.
“Wheat, this year, does not have a ‘heart’, it does not have that nutritious part”, says Pal Gjuraj, from the Association of Wheat Producers of Kosovo.
“Bread requires high-quality wheat,” he adds.
Barometer for grain quality is the hectoliter weight. The higher the hectoliter weight in wheat, the greater the amount of dry matter and the yield of flour.
Under normal conditions, this value should be above 75 in a kilogram of wheat. This value is determined by a special scale, which every flour factory has.
“The weight of a hectoliter this year is up to 75, while last year it was up to 82”, Musa Gashi, owner of the “Grunori” flour factory in the city of Skenderaj, tells Radio Evropa e Lirë.
According to him, the quality of the wheat “is not worrying”.
Harvesting, expensive and insufficient
Imer Rusinovci, professor at the Faculty of Agriculture at the University of Pristina, confirms that this year’s wheat crop does not have the standard parameters, but says that it can be used for the production of flour, respectively baking bread.
“Normally under 65 [pesha e hektolitrit] it is not dedicated to the wheat industry, but the surveys carried out for wheat this year are all over 70”, says Rusinovci for Radio Free Europe.
According to representatives of farmers and millers, the factors that have influenced the poorer quality of wheat are unfavorable climatic conditions and improper fertilization, due to, as they say, the increase in the price of artificial fertilizer.
The price of this product has increased many times, following the increase in the price of other products.
Wheat must be fertilized twice. This year, 100 kilograms of artificial fertilizer have reached 100 euros, compared to last year when they cost 32 euros. Up to 300 kilograms of fertilizer are needed for one hectare of land.
According to the Ministry of Agriculture in Kosovo, namely the Program for direct payments 2021, for one hectare of surface cultivated with wheat, farmers in Kosovo have been subsidized with 75 euros.
In the framework of the Direct Payments Program for 2022, the Minister of Agriculture, Forestry and Rural Development of Kosovo, Faton Peci, has pledged to subsidize farmers for the autumn planting of the wheat crop.
This year’s subsidies amount to 474 euros per hectare, including expenses for fertilizer and oil.
But, in addition to the questionable quality, farmers in Kosovo have warned that the amount of wheat, which will be provided this year from the harvest and threshing, will not be sufficient for the needs of the population.
According to them, the needs will be met up to 50 percent.
The Ministry of Agriculture has said that they expect the demands of the citizens to be met up to 70 percent, while they have not spoken about the quality of wheat so far.
The needs of the population of Kosovo are about 400 thousand tons of wheat per year.
Kosovo, for years, does not fulfill them and depends to a large extent on imports.
Serbia is the country from which it imports the largest amount of wheat and flour.
During the year 2021, Kosovo imported 84 thousand tons of different types of wheat and flour from Serbia – out of the 115 thousand tons it imported in total from different countries.
But, this year, the prices of these imported products have become significantly more expensive, mainly because of Russia’s war in Ukraine.
Russia and Ukraine are among the largest grain exporters in the world and the war between them has caused disruptions in the markets. Radio Free Europe
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