Vietnamese rice prices were expected to fall further next week during the peak of a key crop harvest, traders said on Wednesday. Farmers in the Mekong delta started the winter-spring harvest in February and by the time March ends they would have completed about 70 percent of the harvest covering roughly 1.05 million hectares.
The harvest ending in April reaps the best-quality and highest-yielding grain in Vietnam, the world's second-largest exporter after Thailand.
"Prices are falling slightly," an official at the Vietnam Food Association, an industry body, told Reuters. Traders said foreign buyers did not rush to sign deals as they expected more price declines as forecast by the Trade Ministry.
The ministry said export prices were expected to fall by 3 percent over next week. It said 5-percent broken rice was recently sold at $240-$242 a tonne, free on board at Saigon Port. The contracted prices were lower than this week's quotations of $243-$245 per tonne and last week's $242-$245 for the same grade.
"Prices of Vietnamese rice are forecast to fall by $3-$7 per tonne in the last days of March, the month of the harvest peak," said a Trade Ministry report seen on Wednesday. The accelerating harvest in the Mekong Delta prompted paddy prices to ease, despite busy loading of the grain for export at Saigon Port, Vietnam's biggest.
In A Giang, the delta's key growing province, a kilogram of paddy slipped to 2,280-2,320 dong ($0.14-$0.15) this week, from 2,400-2,450 dong in the first week of March.
Nine vessels are loading 95,100 tonnes at Saigon Port, eight of them for the Philippines and one for Cuba. Another 17 vessels left last week, with more than 147,000 tonnes headed to the Philippines, Japan, Cuba and Africa.
The Trade Ministry said Vietnamese exporters have received contracts to load 2.4 million tonnes of the grain before June.