About a couple of decades ago, Vietnam and other Asian countries, like Thailand and Indonesia, were coming over to the Philippines to study about rice farming. The Philippines was then a major exporter of rice across the globe.
But nowadays, it's the other way around. It is now one of the world's biggest rice importers, and Vietnam is one of its major rice suppliers.
Due to the growing global anxiety over climbing commodity prices, the Philippine government has asked Vietnam to guarantee at least one million tons of rice supply this year. The Philippines' agriculture department has expected that rice output for 2008 will fall between 1.5-million to 1.8-million tons short of demand. Hence, the government is in dire need to stockpile for food security reasons as early as now.
That's why inspite of a Vietnam guarantee, the agriculture department would still be proceeding with its open auction of about 550,000 tons of rice on Mar. 11, 2008.
Meanwhile, average prices have nearly doubled at about US$393 per ton in the past five years due to increasing demand and shortage of available farmland.
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