Vietnam's winter-spring rice crop, the largest of its three annual crops, produced an estimated 20.83 million tonnes of paddy, or unhusked grain, up 4.1 percent from last year due to higher yields, the government said on Thursday. The average yield rose 3.7 percent from 2013 to nearly 6.7 tonne per hectare, while the crop's area only expanded 0.3 percent to 3.12 million hectares (7.7 million acres), the ministry said in its monthly report. Harvest of the crop ended in April in the Mekong Delta food basket, which supplies 90 percent of Vietnam's rice exports.
A higher output in the world's second-largest exporter of the grain after India could help keep Asian prices stable and meet import demand by China, Vietnam's biggest rice buyer so far this year. Indonesia, another key buyer of Vietnamese rice, could more than double rice imports to 1.5 million tonnes this year to keep domestic food prices stable amid rising demand and a likely El Nino weather pattern.
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