Bulgaria's rose harvest is up 31% this year compared with 2025, agriculture minister Plamen Abrovski said at a meeting of the Advisory Council on Oil-Bearing Rose. Growers picked 9,555.9 tonnes of rose petals in 2026, against 6,607.8 tonnes a year earlier.
Of that harvest, 9,308.7 tonnes went for processing — about 98%. Processors actually worked through 9,290.4 tonnes, 41% more than last year.
Rose plantations on the register as of 30 September 2026 cover 5,336 hectares. Bulgaria has 2,975 registered rose growers and 82 rose oil processors, with 57 sites that process the petals.
Bulgaria wants oil-bearing rose to get its own payment from the EU budget under the Common Agricultural Policy after 2027. The minister put forward the proposal earlier this week in Brussels, at a meeting of the EU Agriculture and Fisheries Council. He wants a new article added to the CAP regulation to create a "special payment for oil-bearing rose", funded from the policy's budget.
The agriculture ministry wants a dedicated budget for rose written into an EU regulation, following the same model already used for milk. That would give the sector its own funding, instead of leaving it to decisions made in Bulgaria alone.
"Roses are our top priority right now. I haven't stopped raising the issue of support for this sector at every meeting of EU farm ministers in Brussels," Abrovski said.
Money has also been set aside for a lab to check the quality of rose oil, and the Council of Ministers has approved it. The minister said the lab will guarantee the oil's quality and keep buyers' trust in it, and that the state must be able to prove at any time that what's being sold is genuine. "Since we produce something unique, we also need to check its quality," he said.
The ministry has started updating the rose register to match the real state of the plantations. In 2027, during the flowering season, it will carry out a full new count of the rose fields.
Deputy agriculture minister Yanislav Yanchev and industry groups took part in the meeting. They discussed the state of the sector, crop-protection products, labour, longer-term support for growers and how competitive Bulgarian rose oil is.