Andalusia ends sugar beet cultivation after 130 years as Jerez plant switches to imported cane

Andalusia will not have a sugar beet campaign in 2026, closing a crop cycle that began in the region at the end of the nineteenth century. The Comision Nacional de Estudio de Variedades de Remolacha de Siembra Otonal, which met on 21 September with the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food present, has stopped registering new varieties for southern Spain. As ecosistemastartup.com reports, the decision is not a ban but the administrative closure of the mechanism that kept the chain alive.

There will be no beet milling campaign this year at the Jerez de la Frontera factory, and for the first time in more than a century the region is without the crop. Ministry figures collected by La Voz de Almeria trace 127 years of decline: from more than 50,000 hectares sown in the early twentieth century to the 6,000 hectares still held in the 2024/2025 campaign. AB Azucarera Iberia, the only processor still taking Andalusian beet, decided in 2025 to abandon beet processing and concentrate on refining imported sugar. With no contracts and no receiving industry, the last growers dropped out.

Prices down 35% in under two years

The trigger is price. EU reference data published by La Rioja and cited by AB Azucarera and the cooperative ACOR put sugar in the southern region - Spain, Italy, Romania and Portugal - at 558 euros per tonne in March 2026, 11% below a year earlier. The European average stood at 550 euros per tonne, a fall of 7.2%.

Xataka reconstructs a steeper slope: white sugar was paid at 856 euros per tonne in December 2023 and 563 euros per tonne in January 2026, with sector forecasts pointing to 425 euros. That is a 35% drop in under two years, set against the costs of an irrigated crop, comparable to maize, that have kept rising. "The value chain will have to rebalance. We cannot aspire to stable European production if rising costs are not reflected in prices," said Salome Santos, agricultural director of AB Azucarera.

A Europe-wide contraction

The Andalusian retreat is the most visible part of a broader adjustment across the European beet sector.

• EU beet area fell 10.6% over the last two years and five factories have announced closure, according to Ministry data reported by La Voz de Almeria.
• The Czech beet growers' union puts the count at 20 processing plants closed in the EU since 2017.
• In the Czech Republic the purchase price paid to growers fell to 12 crowns per kilogram this spring, after crystal sugar hit a record 32.23 crowns per kilogram two years earlier, according to novinky.cz as reported by aroundprague.cz; one Czech factory has closed in the past year.
• Czech per capita sugar consumption fell from 36.9 kg in 2022 to 30.8 kg in 2024.

Trade policy has moved, but late. The EU approved a twelve-month suspension of the inward processing regime for raw cane sugar, a measure AB Azucarera and ACOR had requested for years, according to La Rioja. The regime allowed duty-free sugar imports for biscuit and jam manufacturers, and its suspension was intended to protect local growers. By the industry's own account it has not halted the end of the crop. In parallel, aroundprague.cz reports that Ukraine has been shipping up to 100,000 tonnes a year into the EU duty free since 2022, after quotas were lifted, while Brazil, Thailand and India continue to press with cheap supply at prices Europe cannot match without support.

Cane replaces beet at Jerez

The industrial answer is already in place. Xataka documents a 24 million euro investment at the Guadalete factory in Jerez to process imported sugar cane rather than beet, keeping refining capacity in the province while the raw material is imported. Growers, the article notes, are planting sunflower in large volumes instead.

Castilla y Leon carries the national crop

Castilla y Leon now bears the full weight of Spanish beet production. La Opinion de Zamora and La Rioja report that AB Azucarera grows around 9,400 hectares in Spain, of which more than 5,000 are in Leon following the closure of the La Baneza plant in 2025, while ACOR contributes a further 10,800 hectares in Castilla y Leon and Alava. La Rioja lost the crop in the current campaign because of the cost of hauling beet to Toro, in Zamora, AB Azucarera's only operating factory after industrial concentration.

The chain that ends in 2026 began on 1 January 1899 in Havana. Xataka explains that the loss of Cuba deprived Spain of overseas sugar and triggered a beet boom that financed much of Andalusian modernisation, including the Gran Via de Colon in Granada, built with sugar capital. Almeria went through the same sequence earlier: beet disappeared from its Poniente in 1983, replaced by the greenhouses now known as Europe's vegetable garden.