Farm Prices Fall 6.8%, Fruit Drops 16.7% in Serbia
Producer prices in Serbian agriculture were 6.8 percent lower in June than a year earlier, the Republic Statistical Office reported. Fruit fell 16.7 percent, and livestock and poultry 14.5.
Producer prices for agricultural and fishery products in Serbia were 6.8 percent lower in June 2026 than in June 2025. The figure was published on August 12 by the Republic Statistical Office (RZS), in its monthly index of the prices farmers receive when they sell their goods on.
The decline is not spread evenly across sectors. Measured against the same month a year earlier, three groups drove most of the drop:
- fruit, down 16.7 percent
- livestock and poultry, down 14.5 percent
- livestock products, down 7.2 percent
Fruit, in other words, lost twice as much as the overall average. This is the group that carries plums, raspberries, apples and sour cherries in Serbia’s food exports, so a difference of sixteen percent per kilogram shows up in farm income before it shows up in any other statistic.
How fast is the decline on a monthly basis?
Compared with May 2026, producer prices in June were on average 2.7 percent lower. The ranking of groups shifts here: grains lost 4.7 percent month on month, and fruit 5.8 percent.
Fruit shows up in both comparisons, the annual one and the monthly one. Grains appear only in the short-term reading, meaning their decline is still forming and has not yet fed through into the year-on-year figures.
What the first half of the year shows
Over the January through June 2026 period, average producer prices were 3.2 percent lower than in the same period of 2025. By group, livestock and poultry were cheaper by 3.6 percent, industrial crops by 7.7 percent, and livestock products by 5.1 percent.
June’s 6.8 percent drop is twice as deep as the six month average. That means the gap with last year widened as the half year went on, rather than being spread evenly from January onward.
Who loses, and who pays less
The index does not measure the price on a supermarket shelf. It measures what a producer collects at the point of sale, in other words the purchase price a farmer is paid. For a fruit grower delivering plums this season, a 16.7 percent drop means lower revenue on the same volume of goods, while fuel, packaging, cold storage and seasonal labor do not enter this index at all.
On the other side of the chain sit processors, cold storage operators and traders, for whom the same raw material is cheaper this year. With livestock and poultry, where the drop is 14.5 percent, the same logic applies to slaughterhouses and the meat industry.
Livestock products, which include milk and eggs, fared better than live animals: down 7.2 percent year on year in June and down 5.1 percent over the first half of the year. The gap between the two groups is nearly twofold, even though both come from the same farm.
The statistics office released consumer price data the same day: year-on-year inflation in July stood at 1.9 percent, while the monthly rate was negative, at minus 0.2 percent. The two series do not move in lockstep, since processing, transport and margins sit between the field and the checkout, so a 6.8 percent drop on the producer side does not reach the buyer in the same amount.
What the numbers show without further interpretation is direction. The prices Serbian farmers are paid have fallen for six straight months against the year before, and in June they also fell against the previous month. The next reading of the same index will show whether fruit prices held after May’s 5.8 percent monthly drop, or whether the July harvest entered the season at an even lower price.
