Title: "Impact of the Epidemic on Agricultural Product Imports"
Date: "2020-03-31"
Categories:
- "finance"
Today, the agricultural sector continues to perform strongly in the market due to the news of Egypt's ban on grain exports. Stocks of companies such as New Hope and Yasheng Group have risen sharply. We have to be concerned about the extent of our domestic reliance on imported agricultural products. Let's first share a statistical table from TrueQuant:
We cannot verify the import dependency mentioned in the table, but we have roughly compared the data on the main importing countries and import proportions in the table with the monthly import and export statistics report published by the Ministry of Commerce (unfortunately, the data for 2019 is only available for January to May...). We believe that the data from TrueQuant still roughly reflects the real situation.
If this is the case, we can see that the dependency on imports for main food sources such as rice, wheat, corn, etc. is not that significant. Especially for rice and wheat, according to the monthly import and export statistics report from the Ministry of Commerce in December 2018, the total value was only 90,000 US dollars for the entire year, and it decreased by 50% compared to the same period in 2017. In the monthly import and export statistics report for May 2019, rice and wheat were blank (which I understand as very little). The agricultural product with a higher import dependency is probably soybeans. According to the monthly import and export statistics report from the Ministry of Commerce in December 2018 and May 2019, soybeans reached 3.8 million US dollars (January to December 2018) and 1.32 million US dollars (January to May 2019), which is much higher than other agricultural products.
Therefore, it seems that the impact of the overseas epidemic on agricultural product imports should not be that significant. However, it may still have a short-term impact on investor sentiment and the market.