Cuba buys 250,000 tonnes of rice from Vietnam

Cuba has bought 250,000 tonnes of Vietnamese rice, a state-run newspaper reported on Tuesday, after the Latin American nation reported production falling at home last year. The purchase was under a government contract signed recently, Vietnam Food Association Chairman Truong Thanh Phong was quoted by the Nguoi Lao Dong (Labourer) newspaper as saying.
He gave no further details of the deal. Bangladesh has also been in talks with Vietnam to buy between 150,000 and 200,000 tonnes of rice, Phong said. It was not clear if the talks were separate or for the contract covering 200,000 tonnes Bangladesh said it would sign with Vietnam in the week ending April 3.
Vietnam's contract with Cuba involves a small volume, but along with supplies for the Philippines and Indonesia, it helps keep rice prices up when the world's second-largest exporter of the grain is ending the harvest of its top rice crop. News on the deal with Cuba came after the country's statistics office said in January that rice output last year dropped 12.2 percent from 2009 to 247,400 tonnes, affecting effort to cut massive imports of one of Cuba's main staples. Last year Hanoi-based Vietnam Northern Food Corp, which has been in charge of handling government deals for the Latin American country, sold 400,00 tonnes of rice to Cuba.
Farmers in the Mekong Delta have harvested 965,000 hectares (2.38 million acres) of the winter-spring crop, Vietnam's largest with grain mainly used for export, as of March 30, or 62 percent of the crop's total area, the food association said in a report. The harvest, expected to provide 3 million tonnes of milled rice for export, is due to end this month.
But paddy prices in the Delta have increased 4 percent in the past week to 5.7-5.8 million dong per tonne thanks to loading demand for recent contracts, the report said. In late March the Philippines said it had agreed to import 200,000 tonnes of rice from Vietnam, a deal expected to push up Vietnamese prices. The deal followed Indonesia's purchase in February of 400,000 tonnes of Vietnamese rice. Vietnam's rice exports between January and March rose 17 percent from the same period last year to an estimated 1.69 million tonnes, the government has said.