Beekeeping is one of the most serious branches of agriculture and should not be viewed exclusively through honey production.
Its greatest benefit is the service of pollinating nature, which is worth around EUR 566 million annually, Rodoljub Živadinović, President of the Federation of Beekeeping Organisations of Serbia, told RTS. However, Živadinović warns that imported counterfeits are threatening the survival of domestic beekeepers.
The biggest problem in the beekeeping sector is counterfeit honey, which has driven down the price of genuine honey to such an extent that many people are abandoning beekeeping. Živadinović says that, depending on the type of honey, beekeepers are often unable to cover even their production costs.
“Until recently, the purchase price of acacia honey was at the level of the production cost, which is approximately EUR 4.5. The lowest production cost per kilogram of honey in Serbia is EUR 3.5, but I repeat, this is individual. We calculated that from 2011 to the end of 2023, honey production became 43 per cent more expensive. Now there has been an additional increase of 12 per cent, because everything is becoming more expensive unjustifiably, everyone is taking advantage of the situation, while the purchase price of honey remains the same,” Živadinović points out.
Živadinović warns that the market, in addition to domestic counterfeits, is now flooded with imported ones, priced at around EUR 1.3 per kilogram.
“That is three to five times less than the production cost. These are international counterfeiters, the so-called international beekeeping mafia. A few years ago, they hired chemists to circumvent the most modern methods of detecting counterfeits,” Živadinović notes, adding that they will fight this with the help of a European platform.
Two years have passed since the establishment of the European Beekeeping Association, which was founded in Belgrade.
Živadinović stated that Serbia had a laboratory for food quality control that used an inventive method, the author of which was proposed for a Nobel Prize.
“At the level of the European Union, we are fighting to solve the problem. The EU has accepted this and formed a working group called the ‘honey platform’, which should, by the end of this year, develop a method for testing honey that would make us 100 per cent certain that the honey is genuine. This is not an easy task at all today, and it can only be determined if you carry out a whole range of specific analyses that exist and hope that the counterfeiter was careless in some aspect,” the President of the Federation of Beekeeping Organisations of Serbia explained to RTS.
He noted that at the very beginning of its work, this laboratory stopped around 200 tonnes of counterfeit honey at the border within just a few days.
He sees the reason for the closure of that laboratory in someone’s fear. He believes it was not so much fear of the discovery of counterfeit honey, but rather of potential discoveries of counterfeit spirits and wines.
(021.rs, 08.02.2026)