Agricultural products seek ways to make inroads into Australia

Vietnam has diverse tropical agricultural products and specialities that ca be exported to Australia, said Le Quoc Doanh, Deputy Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development at a recent Vietnam-Australia agriculture policy dialogue held in Canberra.

Vietnamese and Australian agricultural marketing officials evaluated the implementation of agreements reached at the previous dialogue in 2016.

Vietnamese Deputy Minister Doanh asked Australia to create the best possible conditions for Vietnamese agricultural products to penetrate the Oceania market. He said most agricultural products of the two countries are not competitive but complemented each other, which offers them an opportunity to further increase two-way trade values.

Mr Doanh urged Australia to redouble efforts towards opening its doors to passion fruit, high quality longan and some other specialities from Vietnam and provide specific hygiene requirements for some kinds of meat, eggs, milk and dairy products to enable Vietnam to ship them to the market.

While waiting for Australia to double check policies, Vietnam encourages Australian businesses to invest in testing laboratories in Vietnam so that they can test shrimps before exporting to the country. Vietnam also recommends Australia to evaluate and accredit equivalence of designated laboratories in Vietnam.

Australian Deputy Secretary of Agriculture and Water Resources Malcolm Thompson in turn said the two countries need to speed up negotiations on opening the door to fruit and vegetables, animal meat and other agricultural products. Particularly, Mr Thompson said the relevant working group should meet soon to discuss specific measures to boost exports of animal meat and seafood from the two countries.

Australia is the world’s 6th largest agricultural producer although around 50% of its land can be used for agricultural production only.

Australian agricultural workers make up only 2% of the national workforce but can meet domestic demand and export 80% of their total output with the help of science and technology and agricultural policies. The annual average income of an Australian farmer is US$100,000, higher than national GDP per capita (US$60,000).