In recent years, Ukraine has been actively taking on promising markets in Southeast Asia, where it experienced both achievements and failures. Indonesia can be mentioned among the achievements, as this country is persistently a major buyer of Ukrainian grain. At the same time, the market of Vietnam can be considered a failure, as this country actively buys wheat from Russia, but stopped purchases from Ukraine in late 2015. Since both countries are on the top 20 list of the world’s biggest wheat importers, their markets are of extreme importance for Ukraine.

The history of wheat trade with Vietnam started in 2005, and it has shown several ups and downs since then – the longest pause lasted from November 2015 to June 2020;

The main reason for suspending imports was non-conformity with the declared quality standards – quarantine weed and insect species spread in Ukraine;

Trial wheat consignments (in total 1 KMT) were shipped to Vietnam in June 2020. A similar situation was seen in early 2015/16, when a vessel loaded with 54 KMT was dispatched in October following several trial shipments;

It is logical to expect similar developments in the new 2020/21 season as well – if new-crop wheat probes turn out to be within necessary limits, Vietnam will quite probably decide to buy a higher volume.