Weird. "Spud Glut."

[MsAmerica]

Can't believe the excess couldn't be sent to starving populations which would gratefully welcome it.

The World Capital of French Fries Has a Problem: Spud Glut. Too Many Potatoes.
Belgium’s potato harvest set a record, just as tariffs hit U.S. demand for frozen fries and as competition from suppliers in Asia intensified.
By Jenny Gross

A thousand tons of potatoes were stacked 15 feet high in a warehouse on Kris D’haeyere’s farm for months. Even though he offered to sell them for just a couple of euros per ton, no one wanted to buy them. So Mr. D’haeyere did the unthinkable: This month, he dumped the crop back into his fields in eastern Belgium, the cheapest way to dispose of enough potatoes to make 200 million French fries.

Other farmers are doing the same, as Europe faces a surplus of five million metric tons of the type of potato used for fries. For months, the price of a metric ton of potatoes on the spot market in Belgium, the world’s biggest exporter of frozen fries, has languished at precisely zero. It was nearly 600 euros ($690) three years ago...

Good weather produced the biggest European potato harvest in eight years, just as farmers were struggling to sell their crops because the Trump administration’s tariffs hit their exports and new competitors from Asia took market share. More recently, the war in Iran has pushed up prices for energy and fertilizer and made consumers cut back, shrinking profit margins that were already as thin as a shoestring fry.

“Of course it’s bad,” Mr. D’haeyere, 58, said, “but that’s life.” His unsold potatoes had started to sprout, making them impossible to offload. It hit him with a loss of €160,000 on soil, seedlings, fertilizer, labor and other costs and forced him to dip into his savings, he said.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/30/world/europe/europe-belgium-potato-surplus.html

Unfortunately getting it to them would cost a large amount of money that no one is willing to spend, and the local farmers might have something to say about Europe's excess being dumped on their market and destroying their livelihoods...

It's never that simple.

You're right that it's never that simple, @CatherinedeBourgh, but there are organizations, and governmental departments, whose main purpose is getting food to people, and I'm sure they could dig up some money.

I like your handle.

Thanks :)

The other part of the problem is that European farmers get loads of subsidies, so will often produce too much. If that then got taken to places where farming is not subsidised, it would systematically undermine the markets in those places, which would then become dependent on the handouts.

Sadly, the most common reason famine etc. happens is due to armed conflict preventing local farmers from planting and the local distribution from happening. Addressing these would have much more of an impact on victims.

But again that's hard to do...

not easy but not impossible

the food processing companies could transform the potatoes into long life product that can be easily shipped to wherever it's needed and in a form that is acceptable for whatever local preferences are.

and there are other reasons why there is an over supply - less demand. due to the trend to lower carb and less processed foods.

potatoes are great. eat more of them. they are full of fibre and other valuable nutrients.

It seems insane to let them rot after all the effort and resources used to grow them.

I agree with the person above - get them to a dehydration facilities, make potato flour, potato flakes, potato granules for instant mash - this would make them much lighter and easier to transport.

Belgium is famous for it's frites - would its resident population not be encouraged to eat potatoes in their multitude of forms to prevent this?

It’s awful that any food is wasted, especially something raw, process-able and as universally accepted as potatoes. We all know that the world has major problems with the balance of lack / excess and that tragically people die as a result of our incompetence & greed.
Sadly this quantity of product, this late in its storage period, & in bulk on the farm would be very difficult to turn into a viable long term alternative. Processors (in this case most likely including a cannery) would be extremely unlikely to have the capacity to take them at such short notice.
Given the practical limitations of the situation, it’s almost guaranteed that the only way forward in this case is waste - morally criminal imo but sadly a byproduct of the “efficient” world that we live in.

eta - yes dehydrated potatoes would be a great alternative, again if there is capacity. Also an issue with potatoes is that the green bits are toxic so if they’re sprouting then they probably aren’t suitable for this.