Production and export of honey, being a product with a high added value, represents a direction with a high potential for the Moldovan economy. Worth mentioning, 97% of exported honey goes to the European Union, while the Free Trade Agreement between the Republic of Moldova and the EU does not impose any limits on the export of this product to the EU.

On the other hand, exporters are forced to pass through an utterly bureaucratized process when they prepare all the needed documents; they have to pass through 18 formal procedures administrated by different control units before they can export the honey from Moldova. As a result, if there are no issues related to the honey’s quality the whole process can take around 20 days. Moreover, economic agents are forced to pay big amounts of money to check the quality of the honey, and a considerable amount of money is spent on analyses in foreign laboratories.

The Economic Council to the Prime Minister of the Republic of Moldova and MiLab initiated the process of optimization of the honey export procedures in the Republic of Moldova. The final goal of this initiative is to diminish the number of formal procedures, exclude doubled documentation and decrease the prices of the quality tests for honey.

Alongside the Economic Council, we held meetings with 3 governmental organizations responsible for the export of honey: National Agency for the Security of Aliments, Republican Centre for the Veterinary Diagnosis and the Customs Service. Today, 9 July, we had a meeting with the honey exporters, who shared with their expectations related to the improvement of the export conditions. During the meeting, we highlighted the weak points and proposed preliminary solutions for the optimization of the export process.

We hope that together with the E-Government Centre we will manage to apply modern digital technologies to the document issuing procedures, a change that will significantly reduce the time spent for the obtaining of all the necessary documents. Simultaneously, we will consider the possibilities to decrease the costs associated with honey quality analyses.

Shortly, we plan to analyse the way control takes place from the inside and we also plan to pass through the whole process of documents preparation together with exporters to understand better existing bureaucratic barriers they face. We will keep you updated on the progress of our work.

We hope that our efforts will help Moldovan honey to become more competitive at the European market!

MiLab on Medium.com