The beginning of the year is traditionally rather slow in international trade if compared with the end of the year. However, the processes in January 2013 didn’t follow this trend. KSH (Central Statistical Office) published a foreign trade report on January in the middle of April, according to which Hungary’s total export was up 7 percent in terms of value, with agricultural export increasing by 11.3 percent.

In addition to this, from our foreign trade surplus agricultural products had an 81.4-percent share – not bad from a sector that has a mere 10 percent share in our export. In January 2013 Hungary’s agricultural export amounted to a record EUR 841 million, indicating that there is demand for Hungarian agricultural products abroad. What is more, two thirds of this record breaking monthly export was from processed products: our food product, beverage and tobacco product export grew by 29.2 percent. We also exported 26.2 percent more livestock and products of animal origin. These two product groups made up for 56 percent of our export. As for the agricultural foreign trade processes of 2012, we can say that despite the terrible drought Hungary managed to increase its export. In a period when the country’s total export was in stagnation, agriculture’s 12.4-percent export growth was a real success, even more so because last year’s EUR 8.1-billion agri-food export performance was by far the best in the least 25 years. At the same time our food import represented a value of EUR 4.5 billion, which means that our trade balance in agricultural products was in the positive by 31 percent and surpassed the never before reached surplus of EUR 3.6 billion. In 2012 the food industry realised 52.9 percent of the national economy’s trade surplus. One of the reasons behind our export growth was the soaring of grain (especially corn) prices on the international market. If we look back on our food export performance in the last thirteen years, we can see that our agricultural export has become 3.3 times bigger since the year 2000 (measured in EUR) and since Hungary’s accession to the European Union in 2004 the value of our export has become 2.6 times bigger. Our import has quadrupled since 2000 and has become 2.5 times bigger since 2004. In 2012 84 percent of Hungary’s agricultural export went to the European Union and 91 percent of our import came from EU member states. In terms of agricultural export, our position in the EU strengthened in 2012 because our growth on the internal market was above the average at 13.3 percent. 58 percent of our export ended up in ‘old’ member states and 42 percent went to new ones. 84 percent of the export growth achieved in the EU was realised on the markets of the EU-15. Taking a look at our most important agricultural markets, we can see that we only exported less to Slovakia, while in 4 from the top 5 target countries our export growth was above the average. We exported 4.7 percent more to non-EU countries in Europe and on the markets outside Europe we realised a 16.4-percent export growth.