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Agricultural exports rise 22.3% in first nine months
Agricultural export value reached US$14 billion in the first nine months of the year, an increase of 22.3 per cent over the same period last year, according to the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development.
Of the total, seafood accounted for $3.47 billion – an increase of 14.2 per cent over the previous year – while forestry products accounted for $2.6 billion, a whopping 36.3 per cent increase.
Remaining agricultural exports totalled $7.2 billion, an increase of 21.1 per cent, of which rice earned $2.56 billion, an increase of 14 per cent.
The sector as a whole generated 27 per cent of the nation's total export value in first nine months of the year, the ministry said.
Nguyen Viet Chien, director of the ministry's Centre for Information and Statistics, said the increases were due both to high demand and rising global prices.
Among leading cash crops, rice exports totalled 5.5 million tonnes during the nine-month period, an increase of 12 per cent, while rice prices rose to an average of $470 per tonne, 3 per cent higher than last year and nearly comparable to the average price for rice from Thailand, where rice production was effected this year by natural disaster.
Despite gloomy forecasts earlier this year that coffee exports would not reach $1 billion during 2010, coffee exports rose 4.2 per cent in the first nine months to a volume of 925,000 tonnes, while export value has already surpassed $1.3 billion.
Rubber exports climbed to 531,000 tonnes in the first nine months, an increase of 10.9 per cent, earning $1.45 billion – double last year's value.
Tea exports rose 4 per cent in volume during the period to 100,000 tonnes and 16.7 per cent in value to $146 million, while cashew exports jumped by 10 per cent in volume to 143,000 tonnes and by 30 per cent in value to $780 million.
Favourable conditions on world markets have made it likely that total agricultural export value would exceed $16 billion by the end of the year, Chien said.
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