Vietnam's agricultural imports surge in 5 months, mainly from China

By：Xinhua Update：2017-06-01

Vietnam's imports of agro-forestry-fishery products in the first five months of 2017 went up 23.6 percent year-on-year to over 11 billion U.S. dollars, according to Vietnam's Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development on Wednesday.

In the five months, Vietnam spent 547 million U.S. dollars importing over 2 million tons of fertilizers, up 24.4 percent in value and 31.8 percent in volume. Chinese fertilizer imports hiked in both volume and value, accounting for 39.1 percent of Vietnam's total import revenues.

For pesticides and materials for pesticide production, Vietnam imported 400 million U.S. dollars worth of the items, up 41.1 percent, with Chinese products making up 53.4 percent of the total. The import revenue of pesticides and materials from China surged 43.4 percent, said the ministry.

From January to May, Vietnam's animal feed imports saw a year-on-year increase of 27.5 percent to more than 1.5 billion U.S. dollars. China was the fourth largest animal feed supplier to Vietnam, representing 4.2 percent of the market share of the item, after Argentina, the United States and India.

At the same time, Vietnam imported 508 million U.S. dollars worth of seafood, up 28 percent, mainly from India and China, with 25.7 percent and 9.1 percent of the market share, respectively.

Meanwhile, the Southeast Asian nation imported 470 million U.S. dollars worth of fruits and vegetables. Main exporters of the items include Thailand (making up 50.1 percent of the market share) and China (18.9 percent), said the ministry.

Vietnam has so far this year exported 13.7 billion U.S. dollars worth of farm produce, forest products and seafood, up 9.5 percent against the same period last year.