During the period, key agricultural products such as rice, coffee and rubber accounted for US$10.7 billion, up 49.3%; seafood hit US$4.4 billion, up 26.7%; and forestry products reached US$3 billion, up 17%.
In September alone, the country exported US$2.4 billion worth of produce, up US$200 million against the previous month.
Director of the ministry's Information and Statistics Centre, Nguyen Viet Chien said a global price hike has helped to significantly lift turnover as the volume of many key export items has risen only slightly during the period.
Thanks to a price hike of more than 54%, coffee exports earned US$2.2 billion in the first nine months, up by 66.5% over the same period last year, though shipments were up by only 8.9% to 994,000 tonnes.
Rubber export turnover during the period also surged more than 61% to US$2.3 billion, despite an export volume rise of only 3.3% to 530,000 tonnes. Average rubber export prices during the period reached 1,520 per tonne.
Despite an export volume decrease of 7.8% to 129,000 tonnes, cashew valued at US$1.1 billion, up 38.6%.
With a shipment of 6.2 million tonnes, up 17.44%, rice was the largest export earner of agricultural products with US$3.1 billion, up 25.6% in value. Most Vietnamese rice was exported to the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Cuba, Senegal, Bangladesh and Ivory Coast, of which Indonesia for the first time surpassed the Philippines to become Vietnam’s largest rice importer in the first nine months.
With an export turnover of US$2.9 billion in the first nine months, up 17% over the same period last year, woodwork products were the main contributor to the high rise in the country's forestry product export during the first nine months, the ministry said.
As demand for Vietnam's agricultural, forestry and seafood products is showing positive signs, the ministry forecast that the industry would exceed the export target of US$23 billion this year, up by US$3.8 billion over last year.
