HANOI - Paddy prices in the Mekong Delta rice-producing
provinces this week dropped nearly 7 percent compared with a week earlier as the
harvest of the winter-spring rice crop peaked, dealers said on Wednesday.
The government's ban on new export contracts for March and
April imposed earlier this month also contributed to the declines in paddy
prices, they said.
A kg of unhusked paddy was offered around 4,100 dong (25 US
cents) per kg on Wednesday, down from 4,400 dong a week ago, traders in Ho Chi
Minh City said.
"The authorities would only review the ban in May, so for now
the market is very quiet except for the loadings of the old contracts," a trader
with a foreign rice trading firm in Ho Chi Minh City said.
Traders said about 930,000 hectares of the winter-spring
crop, or about 60 percent of the total rice acreage in the Mekong Delta, have
been harvested with yields averaging 6 tons per hectare, taking total available
paddy supply to around 5.5 million tons.
"The supply of new grain from the harvest is quite abundant
now and that will surely put more pressure on prices in the coming weeks if the
export ban is still in place," another trader said.
No export quotations were offered this week due to the export
ban, he added.
Meanwhile, rice exports in the first quarter of 2008 rose 5.3
percent to 859,000 tons compared with the same period last year, while revenues
soared 42.6 percent to $366 million, government statistics released on Tuesday
showed.
Busy loading was sighted at the Saigon Port with nine vessels
loading 120,100 tons of 5 percent and 25 percent broken rice to the Philippines,
Iraq and Africa.
Eight other vessels have completed loading 125,675 tons of the same grades to
Africa, Ukraine and the Philippines.
