Anyone watching the statements of regional analysts in the middle of last month to get a sense of the future of Vietnamese rice exports would probably have come away somewhat confused.
Since the early 1990s, Vietnam has been the world’s second-largest rice exporter after Thailand. Last year, the communist country exported 5 million tonnes behind Thailand’s 10 million.
Thai officials have worried over the years that Vietnam could move into the top spot, and such anxieties resurfaced with a surge of Vietnamese exports this spring. Vietnamese rice exports for the first half of this year hit 3.8 million tonnes, up 56 per cent year-on-year.
Meanwhile, however, a top official at Vietnam’s Agriculture and Rural Development Ministry was warning that Vietnam might have no rice to export at all a decade from now. Nguyen Tri Ngoc, head of the ministry’s Cultivation Department, said too much rice paddy was being converted into housing projects and golf courses.
“If this situation continues uncontrolled, combined with the current rate of population growth, it will be hard to satisfy the demand for rice exports by 2020,” Ngoc said.
And deputies in Vietnam’s National Assembly, along with some economists, were arguing that the Vietnamese government-run export system was hurting average farmers and discouraging them from growing rice.
The critics said the Vietnam Food Association (VFA), which administers government-set quotas on rice exports, works to maximize the profits of rice-exporting businesses rather than farmers. They said it ensures that export contracts are signed when world prices are high but that purchases from farmers lock in low prices.
That situation, they said, is because the leaders of the association are themselves executives of rice-exporting companies.
“It is unfair and undemocratic,” National Assembly delegate Danh Ut said last week. Ut, who represents Kien Giang Province in the heart of Vietnam’s Mekong Delta rice basket, has been among the association’s harshest critics.
“The VFA should serve the interests of the whole country, including farmers, but they only serve the interests of the companies,” Ut said.
Whether or not the association is to blame, rice farmers in Vietnam have not benefited from periods of high prices over the past year and a half. In March last year after global experts predicted a worldwide rice shortage, Vietnam declared a halt to new export contracts.
International spot rice prices shot up 80 percent to US$1,100 per tonne. Rumors of shortages led to a weekend of panic buying by Vietnamese consumers, driving local prices up 200 percent.
But the profits from those price hikes went into traders’ pockets and as Vietnamese farmers increased their planting area and produced a bumper crop, prices fell to US$600 a tonne or less. By last autumn, many farmers said they had sold their crops at a loss.
This year, the government has pursued the opposite strategy, opening the floodgates to massive exports to the Philippines and elsewhere. At the National Assembly session, Vietnamese Trade and Industry Minister Vu Huy Hoang suggested the government might try to help farmers by buying excess crops as reserves.
But some experts said the entire system of government export quotas is outdated.
“The only reason to have quotas and export controls is that they think they’ll export so much that they won’t have enough left here to eat,” said economist Adam McCarty of Mekong Economics.
In the 1980s, McCarty said, smaller rice harvests and inadequate infrastructure sometimes led to local famines in mountainous districts even as the Mekong Delta was exporting rice at high profits.
McCarty said he thinks that today, much larger harvests and better infrastructure have minimized that risk and the association’s twin mission, to ensure both domestic food security and high export revenues, creates a confusing conflict of interest.
As for increasing Vietnamese harvests, Ut said he was skeptical that Vietnam could ever surpass Thailand.
“Their yields are higher than Vietnam’s,” Ut said. “Their quality is higher.”
If Vietnam wants to increase its harvests, senior economist Samarendu Mohanty of the International Rice Research Institute in Manila agreed, it should concentrate on improving yields rather than government intervention to increase rice paddy under cultivation.
“The market should decide where land goes,” Mohanty said. “The more important thing is to produce more rice in the limited land we have available.”
He recommended increased investment in irrigation and development of frost-tolerant and drought-tolerant rice strains.
But separating the government from economic decisions, whether about rice or otherwise, is not standard practice in Vietnam, McCarty said.
“The whole philosophy [in capitalist countries] is keep the bastards apart, keep the businessmen apart from the officials,” McCarty said.
By contrast, “in Vietnam, you have a consensus system where they sit around a table and work out what’s best. Mostly, they get it right, but it’s hard to say in many cases what’s best for Vietnam, and the power blocs always win,” he said.
Saudi Arabian largesse is flooding Egypt’s cultural scene, but the reception is mixed. Some welcome new “cooperation” between two regional powerhouses, while others fear a hostile takeover by Riyadh. In Cairo, historically the cultural capital of the Arab world, Egyptian Minister of Culture Nevine al-Kilany recently hosted Saudi Arabian General Entertainment Authority chairman Turki al-Sheikh. The deep-pocketed al-Sheikh has emerged as a Medici-like patron for Egypt’s cultural elite, courted by Cairo’s top talent to produce a slew of forthcoming films. A new three-way agreement between al-Sheikh, Kilany and United Media Services — a multi-media conglomerate linked to state intelligence that owns much of
The US and other countries should take concrete steps to confront the threats from Beijing to avoid war, US Representative Mario Diaz-Balart said in an interview with Voice of America on March 13. The US should use “every diplomatic economic tool at our disposal to treat China as what it is... to avoid war,” Diaz-Balart said. Giving an example of what the US could do, he said that it has to be more aggressive in its military sales to Taiwan. Actions by cross-party US lawmakers in the past few years such as meeting with Taiwanese officials in Washington and Taipei, and
Denmark’s “one China” policy more and more resembles Beijing’s “one China” principle. At least, this is how things appear. In recent interactions with the Danish state, such as applying for residency permits, a Taiwanese’s nationality would be listed as “China.” That designation occurs for a Taiwanese student coming to Denmark or a Danish citizen arriving in Denmark with, for example, their Taiwanese partner. Details of this were published on Sunday in an article in the Danish daily Berlingske written by Alexander Sjoberg and Tobias Reinwald. The pretext for this new practice is that Denmark does not recognize Taiwan as a state under
The Republic of China (ROC) on Taiwan has no official diplomatic allies in the EU. With the exception of the Vatican, it has no official allies in Europe at all. This does not prevent the ROC — Taiwan — from having close relations with EU member states and other European countries. The exact nature of the relationship does bear revisiting, if only to clarify what is a very complicated and sensitive idea, the details of which leave considerable room for misunderstanding, misrepresentation and disagreement. Only this week, President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) received members of the European Parliament’s Delegation for Relations