This year’s potato, onion and sugar beet harvests have been hard hit by the long summer drought, the national statistics office CBS said on Thursday.

The onion harvest will be down by 44%, the CBS said, while the potato crop will be around 23% below expectations.

‘The onion harvest has totally failed,’Jaap van Wenum, from the LTO Agriculture lobby group, told NOS radio. ‘We had expected a 30% to 40% drop in onions but the damage is worse than we thought. And some farmers have not even bothered to harvest their crop because it is not worth it.’

Onion growers can compensate for their smaller crop with higher prices but most potato farmers had already agreed a contract price with potato processing firms.

‘Potatoes in the shops will be smaller but not much more expensive,’ Van Wenum said. ‘But onions will cost more.’

The CBS figures are preliminary and the final projections will be published in January. Over the past seven years, the actual size of the harvest has been bigger than the forecast.