Chennai: The trade war between the US and China has come as a blessing for India. Indian agro commodity export to China has grown close to 70 per cent till November and is expected to double this fiscal.
Between April and November, agri commodity exports to China stood at '453 crore against '267 crore — a growth of 69 per cent, as per Agricultural and Processed Food Products Export Development Authority data.
With four more months to go for the fiscal-end, industry insiders expect exports to double this year. This high double-digit growth has come after a de-growth last year. In 2017-18, exports to China were down by 12 per cent.
“India’s export to China has been increasing by high double digits for the last many months. We have witnessed both month-on-month growth as well as year-on-year growth,” said Pawan Gupta, founder of Connect2India.
He expects that the growth will continue in the coming months as well. The US–China trade was has opened up additional outbound shipment opportunity of up to $8.7 billion a year for SMEs, specifically for agro producers.
“China has brought down the import duties on several agri commodities and agro products shipped from India However, the awareness about this favourable duty structure is still low among the SMEs” he said.
A large basket of agri commodities have benefitted from the new duty structure.
“China has imposed a 25 per cent tariff on US produced soybean, while removing all tariffs on imports from Asia-Pacific Trade Agreement countries, which includes India. China’s annual soybean import is of around 100 million tonnes. This presents opportunity producers to export to China. Similarly, China is world’s biggest importer of rice, buying more than five million tonne per year.
Recently it has allowed exporting of non basmati rice from India.
