Today, the General Department of Customs held a discussion on solutions to improve competitiveness and boost exports for the agriculture, forestry, and fishery industries. The meeting attracted the participation of more than 100 enterprises operating in the fields of agriculture, forestry and fishery.
Deputy Director of the Customs Supervision and Management Department of the Vietnam Customs Dao Duy Tam said that exports are the bright spot of Vietnam's economy in the first half of 2022 and the agricultural sector act as the backbone of the economy. Specifically, the export turnover of agricultural, forestry, and fishery products reached nearly $28 billion, up 13.9 percent over the same period in 2021.
Amongst them, nine products and groups of products with export value reached over $1 billion including coffee, rubber, cashew, vegetables, rice, pangasius, shrimp, wood products, and inputs for production.
Many businesses believed that despite many impressive results, enterprises and exporters of agro-forestry-fishery products have been facing many challenges like many other industries and fields. many difficulties and great challenges.
Not to mention the high inflation in many export markets, the influence of the Russia-Ukraine war has been causing the price of raw materials, input materials, and logistics costs to increase sharply, directly affecting export prices. In particular, trucks carrying agricultural and aquatic products congested at some northern border gates in recent years have also reduced the industry's performance.
Therefore, many people supposed that the agricultural industry needs a drastic change in production and processing to improve competitiveness. They also thought that it is very necessary to promote exports of agricultural products to old export markets as well as countries under the EU-Vietnam Free Trade Agreement (EVFTA) and the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) Agreements.
However, in order to be able to do this, the authorities need to identify and make drastic changes in procedural reform, or policy mechanisms so as to promote Vietnam's agricultural, forestry, and fishery exports to dominate the world market, achieving the goals set by the agricultural sector in 2022, as well as develop sustainably in the coming years.
Being an official in a management agency, Mr. Dao Duy Tam said that in a bid to promote agro-forestry-fishery trade, the government has developed many supporting mechanisms and policies, creating maximum favorable conditions such as simple customs procedures for export goods, especially agricultural and aquatic products, facilitating trade and being given priority in carrying out customs procedures and customs supervision.
However, the complicated Covid-19 epidemic with the appearance of new coronavirus sub-variants has resulted in many countries to still strictly applying preventive control measures against the epidemic, causing certain restrictions on import and export activities.
