INTERVIEW – Serbia Should Support Exports of Agriculture, Construction Firms To Boost Economy

“Ex-Yugoslavia's exports [of arms and ammunitions] were really big and these markets know the quality and the price of the products,” said Aca Popovic, special advisor to the chamber's President Milos Bugarin, referring mainly to Asia and Africa.

Serbia's exports of arms and ammunition have somewhat picked up recently, mainly thanks to the support rendered by state-owned umbrella firm Jugoimport SDPR which is in charge of representing all Serbian arms producers abroad, Popovic told SeeNews without giving figures.

“At the same time Defence Minister [Dragan Sutanovac] has a good sense for this business and takes with him the director of this firm wherever he goes,” Popovic said on the sidelines of the ABC South-East European Conference on Infrastructure in Focus of Internationalisation – New Perspectives for Interregional Cooperation between small and medium enterprises, held in Bulgaria's capital Sofia on Tuesday.

The state needs to create firms similar to Jugoimport SDPR that will represent the interests of Serbian agriculture and construction companies in large-scale projects abroad, he added.

The share of agriculture in Serbia's gross domestic product decreased from 18% in 2000 to 8.3% in 2007, the last year for which official figures are available. Over the same period, the construction industry's share of the GDP rose slightly to 4.4% from 3.4%.
 
“We have good chances to opt for the Russian market – but you need to keep up with the volumes they ask for, the quality they want, especially when there is goodwill.”

According to Popovic, the Serbian government should support farm exports with a mix of organisational and financial measures.

As far as construction services are concerned the state needs to set up an export guarantee fund that will support the Serbian construction firms' business abroad, Popovic said.

The state also has to render institutional support to Serbian construction firms taking part in tenders for large-scale projects abroad, “as our relatively small firms, compared to what we used to have, don’t have their own potential to compete in bigger foreign projects,” he added.

Former Yugoslavia's exports of arms and ammunition totalled $400 million a year on average and sometimes they were worth much more in the 1980s. The former Yugoslav Federation, of which Serbia was part, exported $2.0 billion worth of weapons to Iraq during the Arab country's 1980s war with Iran, and made big sales to Libya.