The Croatian Chamber of Commerce (HGK) has urged Croatians to buy locally grown Christmas trees to support producers in the country. 

There are around 1,000 producers of Christmas trees, mostly selling to the domestic market, who put over 200,000 trees on the market last year, according to the Central Bureau of Statistics. However, exports are at a relatively low level, and there are substantial imports from Scandinavia. 

"Given such a large number of domestic producers, the export potential is significant,” said Dragan Kovacevic, the HGK’s vice-president for agriculture and tourism. 

Despite this, last year Croatia exported just 310 trees to Bosnia & Herzegovina for less than €1,300. In the same period, more than 28,000 Christmas trees were imported, of which two thirds were from Denmark, Europe’s largest exporter of Christmas trees.

Kovacevic noted that Croatia is growing Christmas tree plantations, with 140,000 seedlings of common and silver spruce planted on an area of approximately 40 hectares, and a smaller amount of fir and spruce intended exclusively for Christmas trees. Each tree takes around 10 years to grow. 

“This year shows an upward trend in domestic market demand. Our goal is to achieve an annual delivery of mature Christmas tree trees of 30,000 to 50,000 units, both for the domestic and European market, which is slowly opening up to us,” said the president of the Croatian Forests, Krunoslav Jakupčić, quoted by the HGK.