Market Morsel: The size of the pie

Market Morsel

My distinguished colleague Matt has written an article on the boost the UAE could provide to Australian agriculture through a free trade agreement (see here). In this article, he focused on the existing trade between Australia and the UAE.

I wanted to look at the full size of the pie. I took a quick look at the trade data. The first chart below shows the total imports in USD for some of our key commodities. We can see strong imports of canola and wheat in recent years, with meat purchases quite consistent.

The important chart, in my view, is the second chart. This one shows the total trade and how much trade Australia has with the UAE.

The gap between the two is where we can win by buying more from Australia. We provide 29% of the trade on average, but it has been as high as 45%.

FTA agreements are of paramount importance for an export-dominant industry like ours.