One of the leading players in the UK cucumber industry has pleaded with supermarkets to put the price they pay to growers up by just a few pence.
Derek Hargreaves, technical officer of the Cucumber Growers Association (CGA), says just a 3p rise would help growers who are “on their knees”.
Cucumbers have been one of the main weapons in the supermarket price war. Data provided to FPJ by Produce View shows that in The Co-operative, the price of a whole cucumber has fallen from 80p to 39p in the last year. And all five of the UK’s biggest retailers have taken at least 30p off the price over the last three years.
Hargreaves said: “Everyone is selling the same amount of cucumbers for a low price. They make no money. We make no money. You’re seeing prices below 50p, and they’re not even a loss leader, as they’re pushing the price down to the growers too. The writing is plain and clear on the wall, and there’s just such little availability for investing in the future.
“I worry for cucumber production in the long term in the UK. We used to deal with cucumber growers who bought land to expand. We don’t see any of that now, and people are going to end up growing less and less.”
Hargreaves pointed to the example of one-time cucumber-growing giant Humber Growers recently ceasing to grow the crop. He also noted that the UK now grows around 100ha of cucumbers, compared to around 240ha in the 1970s: “People are looking at the returns and saying, ‘we should do something else’ – be it new crops, or take the money and run, sell the land for housing and bugger off,” Hargreaves told FPJ.
“Supermarkets only need to put the price back up by 3p, that’s all. This year has been a good production year. But in a bad year, where you see a 10 to 15 per cent drop in production – well, it’s just really not a good situation at all. Growers aren’t idiots. If they keep getting a kicking, they will stop, as you know the kicking will then stop.”
Hargreaves pointed out that the CGA has had meetings with government ministers and various authorities, but that while they “all make meaningful noises, nothing ever gets done.”
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