According to recent figures, last year's export performance was €60.1 billion. Including additions and estimations, the Federal Ministry of Food, Agriculture and Consumer Protection (BMELV) expects the overall annual result to be more than €63 billion. Growth levels were shown to vary between the different product groups. Meat and meat products achieved stable growth with an export value of €9.0 billion (up 8.5 percent).This increase is essentially price-related - in many segments, the export volumes were unable to sustain the developments of previous years. In the equally important segment of milk and dairy products, the export value saw a minimal increase of only one percent to just under €8.2 billion. Breaking this down, the value and volume of cheese exports continued to increase while other dairy products recorded a downward trend. With rapeseed being the most important oil seed, better rapeseed harvests than in 2011 translated into increased exports of vegetable oils and oil seed meals. A total of €3.6 billion worth of oil seeds and related processed products were exported. This increase of 22.8 percent is the strongest rise among all the product groups.
Many EU partners still rank among the top countries of destination. Shipments to other EU Member States increased by 5.4 percent to €45.1 billion. But this figure conceals significant differences in the development of exports to individual countries of destination. In some cases, exports to Scandinavian countries and Great Britain recorded double-digit growth rates while overall exports to EU Mediterranean countries were in decline.
As in previous years, German agricultural exports to non-EU countries again showed significant increases. Exports to non-EU countries totalled €15.0 billion, marking an increase of 12.4 percent over the previous year. Non-EU exports are thus becoming more important for the German agri-food industry. With this group of countries, the growth rate of agricultural exports was even higher than for German exports overall. However, the export value for the most important non-EU country market Russia fell just short of the previous year (down 2.6 percent to €1.86 billion). More satisfactory were the developments regarding the US market and exports to many Arabic and East Asian countries. The People's Republic of China already ranks fifth among the non-EU country markets with an agricultural export value of €667 million.
