Rice prices in India and Vietnam advanced this week, while prices of the Thai grain remained unchanged for the second consecutive weeek, traders said on Thursday In India, the world's biggest rice exporter, the price of 5 percent broken parboiled rice rose to $376-$381 per tonne from $371-$376 last week thanks to good demand from local and overseas buyers.
"Millers are paying farmers more than the government's fixed price to secure paddy supplies. Export demand was good in the last few weeks from African countries," said M. Adishankar, executive director at Sri Lalitha, a leading rice exporter based in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh.
For the 2016-17 season, India has raised the minimum price for common grades of paddy rice by about 4.3 percent. Government agencies are also actively buying paddy for the public distribution system, pushing prices above the minimum purchase price, exporters said.
The country's rice exports in 2016 fell 10 percent from a year earlier to 10.1 million tonnes, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) said in its December rice report. The price of Thai benchmark 5 percent broken rice was unchanged at $355-$360 a tonne, free-on-board (FOB) Bangkok, for the second consecutive week.
Traders said the market remained quiet, as buyers awaited the first state auction of the year on February 16, in which the government aims to offload 2.8 million tonnes of old rice. "Buyers are waiting to buy rice from the state auction," a trader in Bangkok said. A drop in exports is expected this year to about 9.5 million tonnes due to more aggressive competition from Vietnam, the Thai Rice Exporters Association said last week. Thailand and Vietnam are the world's second and third biggest rice exporters behind India. Vietnam's 5 percent broken rice price rose to $352-$355 a tonne, FOB Saigon, from $335-$340 last week.
Vietnamese stockpiles were thin ahead of the harvest season later this month while exporters needed grains to fill orders signed before the Lunar New Year, traders said."We are about to enter the harvest season but prices have not fallen because there are some orders from China signed before Tet," said a Ho Chi Minh City-based trader.
Vietnam's rice exports declined 26.5 percent last year with demand from China and Southeast Asian countries, including the Philippines and Indonesia, falling sharply amid rising supplies from Thailand and India. Shipments are estimated to have fallen to 325,000 tonnes in January, down 32.3 percent from a year earlier, Vietnamese government data showed.
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