Amid Weak Harvest and Food Inflation, Turkey Sees Export Hopes

坚果里有什么？如果你是火鸡，这种富含蛋白质和单不饱和脂肪的食物对你的健康至关重要。该国以盛产开心果的baklava而闻名，也是迄今为止世界上最大的榛子生产国，约占全球供应量的70%。

Lately, though, nature hasn’t been cooperating. Turkey usually churns out almost 600,000 tons of the tree nut each year; in 2013 that bounty was worth about $1.85 billion. Heavy storms and frosts this past winter and spring damaged the crop on the country’s normally temperate Black Sea coast, forcing growers to reduce their outlook to 370,000 tons. Agriculture generated approximately $5 billion of exports last year, including $1.7 billion from hazelnuts, a relatively modest share of the country’s total exports of $152 billion. But with a current-account deficit running at about 6 percent of gross domestic product — the highest rate among major新兴市场经济体— any hit to exports is potentially bad news for the economy.

As a supply crunch looms, the price of hazelnuts is set to spike when the harvest starts this month. According to initial numbers released September 2, Turkish hazelnuts are expected to fetch an all-time high of 13 Turkish lira ($6.02) per kilogram, up from last year’s price of 6 lira (then worth $2.77). “By today’s standards, the likelihood that prices will fall below 10 lira is very weak,” Mustafa Demirci, head of the regional Giresun Commodity Exchange, in the heart of hazelnut country, told local news siteHaber61.net网站.

Farmers and wholesalers have been stockpiling the nuts in hopes of getting even more for their goods from outside consumers such as Ferrero, the Alba, Italy–based confectioner whose products include Nutella spread, Ferrero Rocher chocolates and Kinder chocolate eggs. The largest purchaser of hazelnuts, buying up some 25 percent of the world’s supply, Ferrero sources 80 percent of its hazelnuts from Turkey, according to Turkish newspaperHürriyet.

Given that each 13-ounce jar of Nutella contains more than 50 hazelnuts, Ferrero has a vested interest in the crop. On July 16 it announced its $500 million acquisition of top Turkish producer Oltan Gida, headquartered in Trabzon, the hazelnut region’s biggest city.

The same inclement weather that affected hazelnuts has hit yields and pushed up prices of several other Turkish export crops, including apricots, lemons, pistachios and olives. Nationwide, fruit production is down 90 percent this year, says Semsi Bayraktar, president of the Turkish Union of Agricultural Chambers (TZOB).

国内外大型食品加工商有足够的资金来抵御这场风暴，但农场的困境将使土耳其消费者吃紧。8月份食品价格较上年同期上涨14.44%，为6年来最大涨幅，加剧了核心通胀率（不包括食品和燃料）攀升至9.54%的局面，几乎是土耳其央行目标的两倍。通胀上升无助于降息的前景，尽管有来自欧洲的降息压力Recep Tayyip Erdogan, voted in last month as Turkey’s first directly elected president. The central bank, which had jacked up its one-week repo rate by 5.5 percentage points in January to stem the lira’s devaluation, trimmed the rate by a total of 1.75 points, to 8.25 percent, between May and July but held it steady in August. The bank’s next meeting is scheduled for September 25.

一线希望土耳其及其陷入困境的farm economy is the opening made by Moscow’s recently announced one-year embargo on fruit, vegetables, meat, poultry, fish and dairy products from Australia, Canada, the European Union, Norway and the U.S. In 2013, Russia’s food imports totaled some $39 billion, according to the Geneva-based International Trade Centre; of the $17.2 billion of goods from countries covered by the embargo, $9.2 billion fell into the banned categories. That year Turkey’s agricultural exports to Russia amounted to $1.18 billion, TZOB reports.

Output of much of Turkey’s crops may be sorely lagging behind. But prices are up, and any agricultural surplus may find an eager buyer in Russia, which “is particularly tied to the outside for fresh fruits and vegetables,” TZOB president Bayraktar noted in an August 8 press release. In a nutshell, this could make the most of a bitter harvest.

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