“A total of almost HUF 230 billion in funding from domestic and EU funds has been channelled to the food sector since 2014, also stimulating the relevant investments”, Minister of State for Food Chain Supervision Róbert Zsigó said at the Agora professional conference.
This year was the second time the Agora conference was organised, this time by Hungarian Product Nonprofit Ltd. Under the “Look for the customer and the employee” programme, the participating food industrial companies had the opportunity to listen to presentations on topics that concern key areas of their development.
In his opening speech, Róbert Zsigó underlined that the food industry had a successful year in 2017. Half of the output of the national economy relates to the processing industry and, within that, the food industry output of HUF 3,232 billion represented the second highest value, 13 percent, among the 12 processing industry branches.
Mr. Zsigó explained that thanks to the developments of the domestic enterprises and the consistent government strategy the level of processing has kept rising within the Hungarian food sector. In terms of output value, Hungary ranks 16th in the EU28 and 3rd in the V4, and the relative figure increased by 3 percent compared to 2015.
The Secretary of State of the Ministry of Agriculture noted that the Hungarian government is promoting the marketing of Hungarian food articles via several measures. A 20-point action plan was adopted in July last year to raise the quality of food products, increase consumer awareness and enhance the efficiency of official activities. Besides tightening the quality provisions of the Hungarian Food Book (Codex Alimentarius), the most important objective of the plan is to enable Hungarian consumers access safe, high-quality food articles supporting health preservation, produced as much as possible by the Hungarian food industry, from basic materials produced by the agriculture of the country.
The Secretary of State outlined that the retail sales of local products had emerged within certain product groups and expanded in others. Today, this is encouraged by the rural policy of the government, and also by sustainability considerations and the ecological criteria of the shorter supply chain, and it is also urged by the growing awareness and higher demands of consumers.