Nguyen Thanh Bien, deputy minister of Industry and Trade, said at a meeting with the Vietnam Food Association in Ho Chi Minh City on Thursday, that the Government will purchase and stockpile large quantities of summer-autumn and autumn-winter rice from farmers this year.
At present, Vietnamese rice faces serious competition from Indian low-quality rice and Thai high-quality rice. Though businesses exported 3.4 tons out of 5.2 tons contracted for export in the first six months of the year.
Nguyen Van Tien, director of An Giang Import Export Company, said that Japan has not imported rice from Vietnam for the last three years due to high pesticide content.
However, recently Japan said that Vietnamese rice samples had met with their quality and safety standards. This may reopen a new opportunity for Vietnamese rice exporters to enter the Japanese market once again.
Besides this, Vietnam has also won a new bid to export 30,000 tons of rice to South Korea.
Truong Thanh Phong, chairman of the Vietnam Food Association, said that Indonesia is a potential market for Vietnamese rice for the remaining part of the year.
Rice exports in the first half of the year showed some positive signs. Vietnam exported 1.7 million tons of high-quality rice, accounting for nearly 50 percent of the total rice export in the country and an increase of 53 percent over the same period last year.
Export of fragrant rice touched 253,000 tons, accounting for 7.6 percent of the total rice export and an increase of 40 percent. Only low-quality rice saw a fall of 44 percent.
