Vietnam’s rice export may face a gloomy time due to fierce competition from two neighboring rivals of the Philippines and Cambodia, said Pham Hoang Ngan, director of agricultural analysis firm Agrovietlink Corporation.
The Philippines, which bought 50.6% of Vietnam’s rice exports in the first half of this year, is implementing a large-scale rice cultivation program, Ngan was cited by the Vietnam Investment Review newspaper as saying.
The Pilot FIEL (Farmer, Irrigation, Energy, Labor) program, kicked off in 2009 with good rice varieties and big government supports, had tripled the Philippines’s rice output, enabling the country to stop importing rice in three years.
Cambodia is also preparing a similar program to become the world’s third largest rice supplier with an expected export volume of 10 millions tons of rice over the next decade, Ngan said.
Cambodian rice cultivation land is ideal for high quality rice cultivation, while its population is quite little, currently sitting at over 13 million people.
Meanwhile, Vietnam is now home to four million hectares of rice cultivation, with some 59,000 hectares reclaimed for non-agricultural purposes yearly.
Many farmers in the northern region and the Mekong Delta are planting rice just to keep their land, while their main incomes are from growing other plants with higher economic values.
The government offers no attractive incentives for rice growers, Ngan noted, warning that this will be a big menace to the country’s national security in the long term.
The Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development’s Crop Production Department said Vietnam might no longer be able to export rice over the next ten years due to its backward cultivation technology coupled with increasing population.
The department predicted Vietnam’s population would grow to more than 100 million by 2020 and 110 million by 2030.
It stated that paddy cultivation area of the Mekong Delta, which occupied 96% of Vietnam’s total rice exports, was 3.8 million hectares that is able to churn out 19 million tons of un-husked rice.
The region is forecast to produce 21 million tons of un-husked rice by 2020 or even 2030, while the rice cultivation area is being threatened by drought, salt intrusion, floods and pests as a result of climate change. (VIR)
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