Sunflower Price Falls to 40 Dinars, Regional Rate 68

The advance purchase price for this year’s sunflower crop is 40 dinars per kilogram, the figure oilseed processors and other buyers have set for producers, announced on August 13. Last year growers were paid between 55 and 60 dinars per kilogram, so this year’s opening price is 15 to 20 dinars lower, a drop of between 27 and 33 percent. It is the first purchase price of this year’s crop, and it sets the income on roughly 251,000 hectares planted with sunflower.

Farmer Dusan Tornjanski from Banat says buyers agreed on a single uniform price that sits below what sunflower fetches outside Serbia. According to his figures, a ton sells for 580 euros in neighboring countries, or about 68 dinars per kilogram, a gap of 28 dinars per kilogram compared with the domestic advance price.

“This opening purchase price is 15 to 20 dinars lower than in 2025, when we were paid 55 to 60 dinars per kilogram. Everything got 20 to 30 percent more expensive, and sunflower got cheaper in Serbia,” Tornjanski said.

The 20 to 30 percent rise in costs he describes falls in the same season as a smaller harvest. Drought and high temperatures sped up ripening, so the plant, as he puts it, matured under duress. The harvest is nearly over.

What 40 Dinars Means Per Hectare

Yields on individual plots range from 900 kilograms to two tons per hectare, while around four tons is considered a good yield. At the offered price, a hectare yielding two tons brings in 80,000 dinars in gross revenue. A hectare yielding 900 kilograms brings in 36,000 dinars. By comparison, four tons at last year’s 55 dinars would have brought in 220,000 dinars per hectare.

The drop, then, comes from two directions at once: fewer kilograms and a lower price per kilogram. The area under the crop has not shifted. Last year 250,816 hectares of sunflower were harvested, and this year about 251,000 were planted, so the price change is not the result of oversupply in the fields.

Tornjanski says buyers in Serbia are acting like a monopoly by agreeing on a single purchase price, and he is asking the state to explain why agricultural prices are falling while production costs keep rising.

Wheat Already Went Through This Season

Sunflower is not the first crop this has happened to. Buyers paid 20 dinars per kilogram for wheat this year.

Vojislav Malbaski (37), who planted 40 hectares of sunflower, says his wheat cost 27 dinars per kilogram to produce. The gap between production cost and purchase price was seven dinars per kilogram, at the farmer’s expense.

“Buyers paid us 20 dinars per kilogram, and it cost us 27 dinars per kilogram to produce, so I will probably give up farming,” Malbaski said.

He had planned to stay in the countryside, but low purchase prices, years of drought and pricier inputs changed that decision.

“I will probably give up farming. Better to lay tiles,” Malbaski said.

Tornjanski expects corn to go the same way.

“Buyers paid 20 dinars per kilogram for wheat this year, and corn will probably be cheap too, even though it has already been dry for three or four years and yields are down, so logically prices should be going up,” Tornjanski said.

Dry seasons have now followed one another for three to four years running, so a smaller harvest stops being one bad year and becomes a fixed line in the math.

Protest Warning

Producers say that if the 40 dinar per kilogram price stands as final, they will organize a protest.

“If this 40 dinar per kilogram price ends up final, we will have to organize a protest,” Tornjanski said.

The advance price is, as a rule, not the last word, since the final settlement with the buyer comes later, but it is the only number a producer has in hand at the moment of handing over the crop. The next figure that will show which way the season is heading is the corn purchase price.

The government adopted the Agriculture and Rural Development Strategy through 2034 on August 13, a move covered separately, as was the movement of agricultural prices through July.