In our country and in the world economy The agenda is changing at an incredible rate. Last week, I wrote an article about our trade with Russia and said let’s continue next week. Although a week has passed, it seems like we discussed the trade issue with Russia 6 months ago. Meanwhile, many major issues such as the KKM debate, the issue of whether we borrowed from the IMF, the reduction of SCT on vehicles, the increase in our reserves, and the decrease in CDS were discussed. Therefore, our Russia issue is also out of fashion. From now on, I will not make a commitment that I will write this one week in advance and the next week. But since we said we will continue, let’s see what we are trading with Russia.
You can’t find answers to questions such as which country we sell which goods, which goods we buy, and how much is the detailed volume. For this, you have to go through certain stages on the TurkStat website, search by country, extract certain data and then consolidate them. The data I used in this article are the data I got from https://biruni.tuik.gov.tr/. There may be slight deviations in data from different sources. There are certain reasons for this, but this is not the subject of our article.
Our foreign trade volume with Russia in 2021 is 32.5 billion dollar. 27.5 billion dollars of this is imports, 5 billion dollars is exports. In the first 6 months of 2022, our foreign trade volume is 29.2 billion dollars, 26.7 billion dollars of imports and 2.5 billion dollars of exports. As you can see, we have a serious foreign trade deficit with Russia. This deficit will be larger in 2022 than in 2021. The main reason for this is the high energy prices and the fact that energy comes first among the products we import from Russia.
We see that vegetables and fruits are at the top of our exports of 7.5 billion dollars in the first 6 months of 2021 and 2022. In the table below, you can find the top 10 products we exported and their 18-month export volumes. The following top 10 products account for 42% of our total exports.
As I mentioned above, the lion’s share of our imports of 54.2 billion dollars in the first 6 months of 2021 and 2022 is energy. Its share in total imports is 44%. Energy items are not explained in detail. It is classified as confidential data. In the table below, you can find the top 10 products we import from Russia.
As you see energy Even if we leave out the issue, the total amount of grains and oils we import from Russia is almost as much as our total exports. There is a huge imbalance between them. Under these conditions, one really wonders in what ways the trade will be carried out in local currencies.
At least for now, no development can be seen in official data that will confirm the claim that I mentioned in my article last week and that took place in the international media, that exports from Europe to Russia were carried out through Turkey and thus the sanctions were breached. We will continue to monitor as data is released for the coming months.