Azerbaijan eyes increasing export of agricultural products to Arab countries

The work is underway to increase the volume of exports of agricultural products from Azerbaijan to Arab countries, Yalchin Aliyev, executive director at the Association for Azerbaijan-Arab Countries Cooperation, told Report.

He noted that meetings were held with wholesale buyers from Arab countries for this purpose: “We have a project to create a wholesale center in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, which are considered the biggest markets among Arab countries. The implementation of this project will facilitate the export of Azerbaijani fruits and vegetables to Arab countries.”

Aliyev noted that although Azerbaijani products are of good quality, they are little known in foreign markets, including the markets of Arab countries. Therefore, the export volume is less than the existing potential: “The markets of the Arab countries are more competitive. For example, tomatoes, which we sell mainly to Russia, don’t have a high selling price in the Arab countries. Therefore, our producers didn’t want to export tomatoes to the Arab countries. But if we had supplied cheap products to these markets in due time, we wouldn’t have faced today’s problems. We are accustomed to the Russian market.”

“At present, the markets of Arab countries are dominated by products from Pakistan, India, Turkey. We have also entered these markets, but expanding exports isn’t an easy task. One of the main problems for Azerbaijani exporters is logistics. We wanted the state to subsidize logistics. If the state pays a certain part of the exporters’ logistics costs, this will help the exporters,” he added.