Rice prices in Thailand may have reached their bottom after remaining stable in the past month amid a lack of fresh demand, while Vietnamese rice prices were steady due to limited supply and weak buying demand, traders said on Wednesday. Negotiations by Thailand, the world's second-biggest rice exporter after India, with Iran would probably start in early 2016, Thailand's Deputy Prime Minister Somkid Jatusripitak told Reuters last week.
But otherwise, buyers only placed small orders for Thai rice, which has kept prices stable in the past month, with Thai 5-percent broken rice standing at $360-$365 on Wednesday, free-on-board (FOB) basis. "Prices have already made a deep drop, so I don't think prices will sink any deeper than this," a Thai trader said.
The current price has fallen below the average of $390 a tonne in January-October 2015, which has in turn had dropped 7.8 percent from the same period last year, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) said in a November report. Vietnam's rice of similar grade fell 15 percent in the same period to $350 a tonne, FAO said. The two countries account for 40 percent of the world's rice trade.
In Vietnam' rice prices stood steady in the past two weeks, with the 5-percent broken grain quoted at $375-$380 a tonne, FOB Saigon Port, easing from $375-$385 in late October. The 25-percent broken variety was also flat at $360-$365 a tonne. "The price is now the world's highest so nobody is buying Vietnamese rice," a trader at a foreign firm in Ho Chi Minh City said. Prices surged in October on limited supply while Vietnam sold 450,000 tonnes to the Philippines and another 1 million tonnes to Indonesia, and Manila has also planned more rice imports by the year end.
"Supply is now limited, and prices have been at their peak," another trader said. The country has entered the period between crops and the next harvest will come in late February from the Mekong Delta's winter-spring crop, softening prices, traders said.
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