The Vietnam Food Association (VFA) is hoping to export 600,000 tonnes of
fragrant rice this year, 140,000 tonnes more than last year.
The Thai Government recently introduced a policy of subsidising
fragrant rice and the move has driven up fragrant rice price on the
world market and made Vietnamese fragrant rice more popular with
consumers as it sells at a more competitive price.
The
country’s exports of fragrant rice rose from 216,000 tonnes in 2010 to
460,000 tonnes in 2011. Domestic rice businesses exported almost 230,000
tonnes of fragrant rice in the first five months of this year.
However domestic exporters of fragrant rice say that global demand for
the product has not yet reached the levels it did last year.
Experts say that the global price of fragrant rice is being affected
by a drop in the global price of standard rice and lower consumer
purchasing power.
On top of this, the output of
domestic fragrant rice is threatening the country’s overall rice export
target, as the acreage of summer/autumn and autumn/winter fragrant rice
being grown keeps falling.
To reach the target set for
this year, the agricultural sector needs to encourage farmers to
increase the acreage of autumn/winter fragrant rice they plant to ensure
adequate export volumes, experts say.
Hong Kong and
Taiwan are the major importers of Vietnamese fragrant rice, with Hong
Kong accounting for half of the country’s total exports of fragrant
rice.
Since the beginning of the year, Vietnamese
businesses have opened up several new markets in Africa and Asia . An
exporter in the Mekong Delta says that Asian countries always increase
their imports of fragrant rice at the year’s end as demand soars during
the lunar New Year festival, so he remains confident that more contracts
for fragrant rice exports will be signed.
However,
recently, a group of Chinese businessmen visited the Mekong Delta to
source fragrant rice to export to China and they had asked their
potential Vietnamese partners to mix equal amounts of fragrant rice and
white rice together to raise profits.
The VFA is now
calling on its members to ignore these requests and not to damage the
prestige of Vietnamese rice or compromise its quality.-VNA