The honey exports from Romania is in a deadlock in 2016, amid massive honey imports from Argentina, Mexico and China and lower consumption of honey in Europe, where, however, Romania is at the bottom of the ranking, Ioan Fetea, president of Romanian Beekeepers’ Association (ACA) said.
“It’s for the first time in the last 50 years since our association exports honey, when we have delivered 100 tons of honey in the foreign market, given that we export around 1,500-2,000 tons of honey annually. Now we have 200 tons of honey on stock and we have nothing to do with it, although we invested about RON 20,000,” Fetea said adding that Romania has about 1.4 million bee families, while China has over 8 million.
According to him, Germany is Romania’s main partner, buying almost 80 percent of domestic honey production.
He also said that the poor quality Chinese honey is mixed with good quality honey from Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria, and, more recently, honey in Ukraine. “We have even developed a bill through which the Romanian honey to be protected, and no longer be combined it with all surrogates brought from abroad. We also asked to apply a customs duty on Extra EU28 goods, so we can protect domestic production,” ACA president explained.
As regards the honey consumption, it grew by 15 percent to 550 grams per inhabitant per year in the past two or three years, the beekeepers representative said, but in these conditions Romania is still in the bottom of the top, at European level.