Vietnam - Russia: promotion for agricultural cooperation

On October 12th, the Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development Le Minh Hoan had a meeting with Ambassador of the Russian Federation to Vietnam Gennady Stepanovich Bezdetko (G.S. Bezdetko).

Ambassador Bezdetko said that Vietnam is an important strategic partner of the Russian Federation. The cooperation of the Russian Federation with Vietnam is very diverse, and agriculture is receiving much attention from both sides.

Vietnam became one of the first countries to sign a Free Trade Agreement between Vietnam and the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU FTA) in 2015. As a result, the bilateral trade turnover in recent times has increased 2.5 times, reaching USD 880 million.

Ambassador Bezdetko expressed his delight as the two countries' cooperation in the agricultural sector is still on the rise despite the impact of the Covid-19 epidemic. He said that the two countries have the potential to tighten cooperation in the agricultural sector, especially in the field of agro-forestry-fishery product imports and exports.

Russia's agriculture industry has recently shown many signs of improvement. Russia has positioned the agro-forestry-fishery product export industry, reaching a new height, not to mention many trade promotion projects and forums have been organized between businesses of both parties.

Minister Le Minh Hoan said that this is a premise for the two countries to promote agricultural, forestry and fishery trades in the near future, an opportunity to increase trade frequency between enterprises, commensurate with the two countries’ potential and strengths which still have a lot of room for expansion.

As stated by Minister Le Minh Hoan, during the process of promoting market expansion activities, both sides' ways of approach, legal bases and laws have many similarities as well as differences, so there is a need for the exchange of more specific information to promptly remove obstacles and provide a clear roadmap so that both countries can together create the best conditions for the trading activities.

A number of proposals had been issued at the meeting, such as orienting to encourage market opening and trade promotion between the two countries, focusing on products with competitive advantages specifically seafood, coffee, tea, pepper, fruit, rubber on the Vietnamese side; and meat, wheat, fertilizer, and milk on the Russian side.

Vietnam will coordinate with the Russian Federation to designate or introduce key businesses capable of consolidating agricultural products from each side to expand trade scale and reduce logistics costs to connect supermarket/distribution systems.

Vietnam will carefully consider licensing new Russian meat and seafood exporters to serve as a foundation to negotiate with Russia to increase the number of seafood exporters from Vietnam, especially for commodities such as pangasius, tuna and shrimp.

Ambassador Bezdetko highly regarded the opinions of the Vietnamese side and shared that he will coordinate with the competent ministries of the Russian Federation concerning these issues.

The two countries have been actively working together to solve these problems for a long time. The Ambassador is willing to closely cooperate, listen and exchange ideas on existing issues, especially in the near future when more events are about to take place.