The southernmost province of Ca Mau is supporting seafood enterprises to make good use of the United Kingdom-Viet Nam Free Trade Agreement (UKVFTA) to foster exports to the UK in the near future, the provincial Department of Industry and Trade said.

The province was focusing on helping local firms participate in trade promotion activities to find customers, and expand and develop their markets in the UK, it said, adding that sufficient attention was being paid to disseminating information about the agreement and the UK market to local enterprises.

At the same time, the province was supporting businesses in training to maintain basic knowledge and information on international integration, import and export, tax, customs, and trade promotion skills while enabling enterprises to access preferential loans to improve production and processing efficiency for export.

Top priority was also being given to providing the firms with the technical barriers in trade to limit risks and assisting them to apply advanced quality management systems to meet international standards, technical regulations and regulations in export activities, including those from the UK market.

Besides the support by local authorities, export enterprises should continue to improve their competitiveness, expand production scale, invest in technology, improve the quality of their products and diversify product designs while ensuring food safety and complying with technical standards for exported products, according to the department.

Seafood export is a key industry of the province, accounting for 92 per cent of its total export turnover, according to the department's deputy director Duong Vu Nam.

Typically, the locality is regarded as the country's shrimp capital where shrimp farming takes up approximately 280,000ha of the total existing aquaculture area of over 300,000ha. Currently, Ca Mau's shrimp has been shipped to more than 90 countries and territories around the world.

The country's participation in many free trade agreements, such as the UKVFTA, has provided tax incentives for the province's exporters, especially seafood exporters.

Under the UKVFTA commitments, 50 per cent of tariffs on seafood imported from Viet Nam has been eliminated while the remaining 50 per cent of tariffs will be removed after two, four or six years.

Thanks to the tax incentives, the province's seafood exports to the UK saw a positive increase of 53.3 per cent in 2021. In the first seven months of 2022, its seafood shipments to the market surged significantly by 70 per cent year-on-year.

The latest report from the department revealed that the province exported $848 million worth of seafood to overseas markets in the seven-month period, surging 42 per cent over the same time last year or accounting for 73 per cent of the yearly target.

Besides to the UK, its seafood exports to the EU also witnessed a yearly hike of 45 per cent to $135 million.

With this good performance, the seafood export of the province is well on track to surpass $1.1 billion by the end of this year. — VNS