Hungary participated in an excellent panel discussion on the occasion of launching the new FAO publication “Synergy between Agriculture and Services Trade: Enabling New Growth Opportunities”.

Tamás Vattai, First Secretary at our Permanent Mission highlighted that most competitive agricultural exporters have high services content in their food export. Did you know that 46% of the value in food export of Netherlands or Belgium come from services? There is a lot of ROOM FOR IMPROVEMENT especially in developing countries to add services value to their food exports. It necessitates MORE OPEN AND ENABLING NATIONAL POLICIES to reduce the trade costs in services and allowing greater access to foreign services. Quality of institutions in the importing country is of great importance to services trade, as service providers must often be present in the area where service is supplied.

 

 

The share of services in world exports of agro-food products is 38%. It includes a whole range of services, the most important are: wholesale and retail trade, business services, transport and storage, financial and insurance services. With digitalization of agriculture, like precision farming, the importance of information and communications technology services is growing. The share of services in Hungarian agro-food export is 34%, half of that is supplied by domestic services suppliers.

Summary of publication is available at: http://www.fao.org/publications/card/en/c/CA6986EN/