Australia: a sharp improvement in the trade balance
Australian exports of paste are increasing, but domestic demand has dropped
Over the past three years, Australian expenditure on imported tomato products has dropped noticeably. Evaluated at close on USD 113 million in 2014, the total "tomato products invoice" only amounted to slightly less than USD 91 million last year. This drop is due to the large and progressive fallback of the trade balance deficit for the tomato paste sector in recent years (-57% since the peak of 2011 at 57 000 mT) and, to a lesser extent, it is due to a slight slowdown recorded by the canned tomato sector compared to 2015 results (-12% in volume). This improvement should also be linked to the increase in the level of processing operations observed in recent years, after the catastrophic season of 2011 when two-thirds of the crop were destroyed by exceptionally bad weather conditions.
In total in 2016, supplies of canned tomatoes represented the main item of expenditure for Australian imports, at USD 46 million (down 17% compared to the three previous years). This import category alone costs more than the two other categories put together, given that the value of foreign paste purchases only amounted to USD 23 million last year (17% less than for the period running 2013-2015) and that the expenditure for sauce imports only amounted to USD 21 million (up 2% compared to the three previous years).
The improvement in the "paste" trade balance, both in volume and in value, is not a coincidence. Since 2012, Australian paste exports have recorded a regular progression, particularly to Thailand, Japan, Malaysia and Vietnam, and reached record levels in 2017 with more than 17 000 mT exported to these countries and to a few others (India, New Zealand, Taiwan) with which Australia has an increasingly active trade balance in the tomato paste category. However, the trade deficit remains chronic with regard to Italy, the USA, China and, to a lesser extent, Turkey, Portugal and Iran, even if imports seem to have leveled out over the past five years around a threshold of approximately 41 000 mT per year.
After rapid growth between 1999 and 2011, canned tomato imports noticeably slowed down over the period running 2011-2015, and, possibly as a result of the political and commercial dispute between Australia and Italy over the past three years, it actually slowed to a standstill in 2016 with a 13% drop in quantities (from 66 600 mT in 2015 to 58 200 mT last year). Italy holds 88% of the market (on average since 2007, 92% in 2016), while the USA (4%) with Turkey, New Zealand, China and Spain account for the rest of the country's supply in this sector.
Overall, the volumes of tomato products imported by Australia have dropped considerably since 2011, but the local processing industry's recovery of operational impetus has not progressed proportionately. The capacity of the Australian industry to satisfy domestic demand has clearly progressed once again in recent years (44% on average for the period running 2014-2016), after the incident of 2011, without however returning to the high levels it had reached at the end of the 90s (84%). In the final count, estimates of the demand for tomato products, though inaccurate, seem to indicate that the level of Australian consumption has dropped in recent years.
Some complementary data
In 2016, purchases of canned tomatoes absorbed 51% of total Australian expenditure, with supplies of pastes and sauces respectively accounting for "just" 26% and 23% of the USD 91 million spent on imports of tomato products.
