This year’s apple harvest will be reduced by up to two-thirds in many places because of the extreme cold and the frost on the night of 19 April, the Algemene Dagblad said on Friday.

As a result the blossom on many trees were so damaged that it did not fruit properly, the paper said.

Sector organisation GroentenFuit Huis said farmers in Germany and Belgium were also badly affected. ‘Belgian farmers fear that they lost 80% of their crop in a single night,’ it said.

Carlos Faes of Philips Fruittuin in Eindhoven expects apple traders to speculate by keeping apples from last year’s crop in cold storage longer,  waiting for scarcity on the market and higher prices, he said.

Most years Philips Fruittuin picks 120,000 kilos of apples; this year Faes expects the total to be around 30,000 kilos. The picking season begins in September.