Europe’s largest salt company, Artemsil, has shut down operations and shipped all stocks of finished products. In Ukraine, there was talk of a possible shortage of salt, prices began to rise, and citizens – to complain about the lack of goods in stores ,
KYIV. UkraineGate , 26 , May , 2022 | Society .
The journalist visited the largest retail chains in the capital. As it turned out, most stores do not have salt. According to supermarket employees, most stores have not had the goods for several weeks, and some of them ran out a few days ago.
We walked through the shops and carefully inspected all the shelves. So, in Varus on the shelves we did not see not only salt, but even price tags; in Silpo shelves, where there should be salt, occupied by other goods; at ATB, employees confirmed to us that there has been no salt for several weeks; salt was also not brought to the Forum and the price tags on the goods were removed; The Green Market has run out of salt, and sellers don’t know when it will be; ECO market – shelves where salt should be, empty; in the Delvi chain store, the shelves where the salt was supposed to be were occupied with sugar;
Price tags remained on the shelves of salt in the Novus and Auchan supermarkets. However, as the employees explained, the price indicated on them is no longer relevant. With sadness we see in “Novus” the price tag on which the cost of salt is specified – 18 hryvnias 49 kopecks. In “Auchan” we see the cost of salt – 29, 90… and the shelves are empty.
In one of the Novus we are lucky enough to have almost the last salt cellar with 92 grams of salt worth 109 hryvnias. We calculate: it turns out that the cost of one gram of salt 1 hryvnia 18 kopecks. If we proceed from the norm that one person can consume about 5 grams of salt a day, then at this cost the price of the daily norm is 6 hryvnias. A family of three will spend 540 hryvnias a month on salt. Of course, salt of this format and in such packaging has always been more expensive and was not the main source of its consumption.
On the advice of locals, the correspondent went to the “Volyn wholesale base”, where, they say, you could buy a few kilograms of salt, but there was a failure – local sellers are tired of repeating the learned phrase: “No salt, we do not know when.” They also noted that while the goods were there, they released them at 35 hryvnias per kilogram.
Shopkeepers say that as soon as salt hits the shelves, shoppers buy everything. Due to such excitement and the forced shutdown of the largest enterprise, it is unknown how much the price of salt will increase.
The head of the Ukrainian Peasants’ Union, Ivan Tomych, expressed the opinion that the cost of the product could increase many times over.
It should be noted that the Artemivsk rock salt deposit supplied over 90% of salt in Ukraine as a whole. The state will probably have to import more salt. Although the demand in Ukraine could be met by more than one Artemivsk deposit. So there is a salt deposit in Sloviansk, but there are also battles.
There is still a deposit in Drohobych, Lviv region, and production there currently cannot meet all demand, although the saltworks has said it will increase capacity.
In Transcarpathia, salt can be mined in the Solotvyno field, but floods have negatively affected the field’s capacity.
And Ukrainians consume quite a lot of salt – up to 16 kilograms per year, especially the demand for products is growing in the canning season – it is for her mostly used ordinary rock salt. However, experts are somewhat reassuring that Ukrainians have long preferred sea or iodized salt in their daily consumption over ordinary rock salt, which has caused objective problems due to the war.
If imports improve and demand increases, most types of salt will return to store shelves (except for stone salt from Artemsoli, although some may be offset by the same salt from Drohobych and some imported ones with similar properties).
Retailers have already announced that they will import salt from Poland, Romania, increase imports from Turkey and Italy.
Source: Ukrgat