Chickpea and Lentil are gaining investment appeal

Sunflower, which was the most attractive crop for the agribusiness owing to the high cost efficiency, had to step aside and give way to the niche crop the chickpea and lentil, this has been stated, in particular, by the producers.

“These crops are familiar and have been grown in Ukraine for some time. We, even, have the tradition of our own breeding of these plants, customized farming machinery, and long-term export markets. Nevertheless, they still remain niche crops compared to the volumes of production, growth area, and pace of expansion”, Pavel Kovalev declared, General Director of the Ukrainian Agrarian Confederation (UAC).

Beginning from 2012 the area under this crop is tipping with the tendency to contract. In the same time, prices for chickpea or sometimes known as gram chickling have gone up almost 45% compared to last year and almost 90% more expensive if compared with the prices of 2015.

“This year’s price driver is a quite dry vegetation season in the main producing countries as well as in the main countries of consumption like India, Pakistan, and to some extent, Myanma”, noted by UAC.

Growing chickpea and lentil is suitable for the whole territory of Ukraine, moreover, these plants show good reaction to water impounding and perfectly fit into crop rotation as they are pulses. Furthermore, chickpea and lentil have a good span of margins calculated either way per hectare or per ton of end product, this is what makes them such investment attractive.

“The marginality of chickpeas is greater than sunflower and soybeans, and the close attention to this crop from the side of large vertically-integrated agro producers show the signs that this crop will no longer be a niche product”, Kovalev suggests. Chickpeas and lentil imports are scarce and still going down. Exports are unstable but with a slight trend for growth.

Nevertheless, national producers were able to penetrate the markets that are the traditional consumers of chickpea such as India, Pakistan, Turkey, Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia. Among the big importers of Ukrainian lentil in 2017 were France, Germany, Poland, Czech Republic.