Traditional markets of Vietnam, like Philippines and Malaysia are still maintained but Vietnam is finding it hard to gain big rice export contracts (through tenders) from both countries while the Indian market has not shown clear demand for Vietnamese rice.

Thus, VFA should monitor rice export price flexibly as negotiating with foreign buyers to ensure a minimum profit of 30 percent (about 4,000 dong per kilogram of dry paddy) for farmers and help enterprises keep customers and sign further commercial deals.

More importance is that enterprises must be active in looking for commercial contracts to ease the pressure of current stockpiled rice reserve of over 1.8 million tonnes. Meanwhile, Thailand now has a huge volume of inventory rice of seven million tonnes. At present, Thailand offered the export price at $465-470 per tonne of 5percent broken rice, higher than Vietnam's $390 per tonne.

Due to the unsmooth movement of global rice market, VFA decided to continue reserving 500,000 tonnes of rice in next week after 33 leading companies had reserved 1.2 million tonnes for the first phase.

According to Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, the country's rice harvesting output in 2009-2010 winter spring reached about six million tonnes of paddy equalling to three million tonnes of rice.

In Q1, enterprises exported 1.292 million tonnes of rice, down 18.54 percent in quantity but the average export price was higher $66.42 per tonne compared with the same period of 2009. In Q2, the rice export is estimated at two million tonnes.

Sai Gon Giai Phong - April 14, 2010