Magazine: It is (still?) Chinese to us

In the last few years Hungarian-Chinese economic relations have come to life. Today China has one of the fastest developing economies in the world, for instance China’s export performance already beats that of Germany. If we look back on the last year we can see that Hungarian export to China expanded by nearly 7 percent and our import contracted by 4 percent. Despite these positive changes we must bear in mind that our import from China is still 2.7 times bigger than Hungary’s export to China. It must also be noted that in 2012 only 1.7 percent of our national economy’s export went to China and in 2013 this grew to 1.8 percent, while Chinese import’s share in our total import were 5.7 percent and 5.4 percent, respectively. As for Hungary’s total agricultural export in 2013, the Chinese market’s share was a modest 0.1 percent. China is a bigger bite for Hungary than we can chew! About 22 percent of the Earth’s population lives in China and they need to be fed. Demand for groceries is growing and the Chinese are looking for external sources of food. More than 1.3 billion people live in China but only 14.9 percent of the 9.6 million km² land is suitable for agricultural production (the same ratio is 60 percent in Hungary). But in China 36 percent, 641,410 km² of the land used for agricultural production is irrigated, while in Hungary only 1.3 percent! Hungarian agriculture and food products have a good reputation in China, but this fact isn’t reflected in our agri-food export. So far we didn’t really invest in promoting our products, which is a big mistake, although we have been present at a couple of food industry fairs and have an agricultural attaché in Beijing. In the last two years Hungary made efforts to revitalise bilateral economic relations with China and as part of this in May 2012 a memorandum was signed on establishing the Hungarian-Chinese Scientific and Technological Cooperation and Promotion Centre. This centre will soon start working and its objective is to harmonise the two countries’ R&D programmes and resources. Recently we have also signed a bilateral agreement with China that facilitates our exporting of frozen duck, goose and pork to China. China is a major actor of the world’s economy and decades of economic upturn had a beneficial effect on the Chinese society. These days Chinese people don’t make do with the vegetable-based food they have been eating in the past and the number of meat eaters is growing.