BEIJING, Nov. 3 – The General Administration of Customs of the People’s Republic of China said that Pakistan’s rice export to China in the first three quarters of this year exceeded US$421.94 million with a volume of 1,111,352.57 tonnes (more than one million tonnes), setting a record (GACC).
Data revealed that bilateral trade expanded dramatically over the first nine months of 2022, with China importing more than one million tonnes of various varieties of rice, up 45% from the same period last year. This represents an increase of $131.91 million from 2021.
According to GACC, Pakistan’s broken rice (commodity code: 10064020) export to China has crossed US$ 159.72million, increasing by 80% as compared to last year’s US$ 87.75 million in the same period, with the exported volume growing 38% from 401,867.79 tons last year in the same period tons to 491,678.15 tons.
The GACC data showed that in the first nine months of 2022, China imported more than 4,971,644.621 tons of three different types of rice worth US$ 2.05 billion, increasing 19% by volume from last year’s 3452523.288 tons in the same period worth $1.55 billion from the globe. The main sources of rice imports are Myanmar, Cambodia, India, Pakistan, Thailand, and Vietnam.
According to Badar uz Zaman, a former commercial counselor at the Pakistani Embassy in Beijing, Pakistan set a target of exporting one million tonnes of rice to China this year, a goal that was met much earlier. If it weren’t for the flood in Pakistan, rice export to China would have more than doubled the current level.
Zaheer Ahmad, a rice exporter to China, told Gwadar Pro that Pakistan has high-quality rice varieties, plenty of young labor, vast fertile land, and favorable environmental conditions for agriculture, but that exports to China and other countries aren’t as high as they could be because of outdated technology and degraded seeds.
“Natural disasters are the key problems. Recently we are facing flood which destroyed more than 45% of crops and drought is probably the biggest abiotic stress Pakistani farmers face every year while much country’s planting area is affected by salinization which can be solved through the latest technologies and techniques used in the field of rice production”, he stated.
He further said that years ago, only Basmati rice was an important export earner in Pakistan but broken rice export to China helped Pakistan increase its export in this field, adding that Pakistanis are thankful to China which provided the latest technology in this field like color sorting machines and modern seeds which help out more yield per arc and also duty-free access in the Chinese market.
Zaheer hopes that China will also remove the quota system for Pakistani exporters and will increase the number of exporters from Pakistan, especially small enterprises.
It is to be noted that in 2021 Pakistan exported about 973,000 tons of rice worth US$437 million to China and the total number of Pakistani companies in the approved General Administration of Customs P.R of China list is 53.