VietNamNet Bridge – Vietnam once exported 30,300 tons of rice to Japan in 2012. However, the door to the market has still been closed to Vietnamese exporters. Not one ton more has been exported since then.

According to Vu Thi Thanh Tuyet, Marketing Director of Angimex, Japan organizes 15 bids every year to find the suppliers of tens of thousands of tons each time.

Vietnam has not been put into the list of the exporters to join the bids so far this year. This means that Vietnam still has no opportunity to sell rice to Japan.

In late 2012, Angimex won the bid of supplying 30,000 tons of rice to Japan. In the same year, Marubeni Vietnam ordered the An Giang Plant Protection Company (AGPPS) 300 tons of rice. Both Angimex and AGPPS are in the rice granary province of An Giang.

At that time, when asked about the possibility of bringing Vietnam’s rice to the Japanese market, the representative from Marubeni Vietnam said the export prospect would only be clearer in some months. And six months ago, the representative said no optimistic sign for Vietnam’s rice in the Japanese market.

Currently, Vietnamese rice exporters such as AGPPS or Angimex cannot join the bids themselves to sell rice to the Japanese government. In order to sell rice to Japan, they have to join forces with the Japanese big farm produce groups in Vietnam.

Angimex, for example, set up a joint venture with Kitoku-Shinryo, a Japan-based rice trade group in 1991, which then became the Angimex – Kitoku Company limited in 2008.

Meanwhile, AGPPS sold 300 tons of rice in late 2012 through a subsidiary of Marubeni, a multi-field group. Under their cooperation agreement, the Vietnamese partner was in charge of collecting rice, while the Japanese was in charge for the sale thanks to its deep knowledge about the market, the information network and the existing partners.

According to Angimex – Kitoku, the Japanese importers want the Vietnamese to make changes in the cultivation and production. Vietnam needs to build up large specializing cultivation areas to create high yield, train farmers to use plant protection chemicals in the right way, while farmers need to have cultivation diaries.

The senior executive of the company said Japanese now don’t accept the current way of doing business followed by the rice exporters. In general, the exporters collect rice from different sources, different rice fields in different areas. Therefore, they cannot control the quality of the rice exports, while it’s impossible to track down the origin of products.

According to Le Van Banh, Head of the Mekong River Delta Rice Institute, the Japanese government has been mostly importing Thai rice. Thai farmers have been following the production model that Vietnam is striving to – the large scale rice. Under the mode, rice export companies can order farmers to produce the rice that meet the requirements and the standards of the import markets, including the EU and Japan.

Meanwhile, currently, Vietnamese farmers decide themselves what varieties of rice to cultivate in every crop. Rice export companies just collect what farmers offer to them for export. This means that the companies only have the products they can find in the domestic market, not the products wanted by the importers.

TBKTSG