Syria’s Annual Trade Deficit Stable at EUR 3.3 billion in 2021

Syria’s trade deficit stood at around EUR 3.3 billion last year, unchanged from 2020, according to official statements.

Deputy Minister of Economy and Foreign Trade Rania Al-Ahmad said that the volume of Syria’s foreign trade for 2020 and 2021 stood at around EUR 4.6 billion each. Imports hovered at around EUR 4 billion each year, while exports stood at EUR 664 million in 2021 and EUR 618 million in 2020, resulting in a deficit of around EUR 3.3 billion each year.

On January 14, Ms Al-Ahmad told local radio station Melody FM that around 80 percent of Syria’s imports were made up of raw materials and production inputs for the agricultural and industrial sectors, including wheat and pharmaceutical products.

Despite soaring international shipping costs and commodity prices last year, the government’s import bill did not increase, she said without providing more information.

In her interview, Mrs Ahmad also argued that the Import Replacement Programme (IRP), which advocates replacing foreign imports with domestic production, was the most effective policy to mitigate the fallout of the conflict and reduce the country’s import bill.

The IRP was introduced in Syria in 2018 to ban the import of locally produced items and incentivise local production by reducing fees and interest rates for loans, among other things.

The programme has only managed to attract a small number of investors, according to the Ministry of Economy and Foreign Trade. On February 06, Ms Al-Ahmad told state-owned newspaper Tishreen that, since 2018, 53 investors have applied to the programme, including 41 in the industrial sector and 12 in the agricultural sector. According to state-owned news agency SANA, until August 2021, only ten projects were licensed under the IRP.

Recently, the Syrian business community has raised criticisms about the government’s economic strategy, including its import policy. The government has adopted contradictory economic policies, imposing import bans to curb foreign currency demand on the one hand and authorising the import of unessential commodities on the other.