EEC: COVID-19 has accelerated food trade in EAEU

MOSCOW, 26 August (BelTA) - The coronavirus pandemic has accelerated the growth of trade in food and agricultural products in the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU), BelTA learned from representative of the trade section of the Eurasian Economic Commission Aleksei Ashikhmin.

“Mutual trade in food products among the EAEU member states went up 2.5% in H1 2020 to $4.1 billion compared to the same period last year. In turn, sales of non-food agricultural products soared 13% up to $0.32 billion. Soybean made a significant contribution to the growth of mutual trade. The increase made up 8.4 times. Sugar sales went up 26.2%, cheese and cottage cheese - by 10.2%,” said the representative of the EAEU trade section.

Sales of non-resource non-energy goods remained almost unchanged in physical terms (down by 0.4%). “In monetary terms, mutual trade in non-resource non-energy goods in the EAEU countries declined by 7.0% to $18.2 billion in January-June. However, its share in the total structure of trade in such goods showed an increase from 25.4% to 25.8%. The share of sales of non-resource non-energy goods in the EAEU also increased from 68.4% in H1 2019 to 74.1% in H1 2020,” Aleksei Ashikhmin said.

As for the EAEU non-resource non-energy export to third countries went down by 9.0% to $52.2 billion in H1 2020. At the same time, the share of such export in the total supplies of the EAEU increased from 25.4% to 29.4% year-on-year. The physical volumes of export decreased insignificantly - by 0.2%.

“The sales of food grew 17.2% in monetary terms to $11.4 billion and those of non-food agricultural products went up by 9.1% to $0.62 billion. Among these goods, export sales of sugar (12 times), meat and poultry by-products (2.7 times), sunflower (two times), sunflower oil (42.3%) and wheat (9.3%) increased the most,” the representative of the EAEU trade section said.