According to preliminary statistics from General Department of Customs, in the past 9 months, Vietnam exported more than 7 million tonnes of rice with a value of 4.37 billion USD. In terms of turnover, Vietnam's rice exports increased by 23.5%. On other hand, Vietnam's rice import turnover also increased sharply. In September, Vietnam's rice import turnover skyrocketed by 154.2% compared to the same period last year, reaching 117 million USD.
In the first 9 months, Vietnam spent a total of 996 million USD to import rice products to serve domestic production and consumption needs, up 57.3% compared to the same period last year. This is a record high number for rice industry so far and far exceeds import turnover of 860 million USD for the whole year of 2023.
If import speed is maintained as in the past 2 months, Vietnam's rice import turnover in 2024 could reach 1.3 billion USD.
The above figure is a surprise to many people, because Vietnam is the world's top rice exporting country but has to spend a large amount of money to import this item every year.
Rice has many different segments, such as rice for cooking; raw rice for processing cakes, vermicelli, pho... Therefore, besides achievement of being one of the world's leading rice exporting countries, Vietnam still imports rice for production.
In fact, rice products have many different segments such as: Rice for cooking; Raw rice to make cakes, vermicelli, pho, etc. Therefore, in recent years, in addition to exporting, Vietnam has also imported a large amount of rice to compensate when necessary.
Vietnamese rice is still a world-famous brand, surpassing even rice-producing countries like Thailand in 2021. Since last year, at many times, Vietnam's rice prices have far exceeded those of its competitors, Thailand and Pakistan.
Statistics show that Vietnam's average rice export price in the first 9 months of this year was at 624 USD/tonne, an increase of 13.1% over the same period last year. Meanwhile, according to records from businesses, price of imported rice to Vietnam is commonly around 480-500 USD/tonne.
In recent years, farmers have gradually switched to growing fragrant rice and high-quality rice. Prices of these types of rice on market are very high. Making vermicelli, pho and rice paper only requires tough, fluffy rice and low prices.
In addition, domestic rice supply is currently limited and some export enterprises have to increase rice imports from neighboring countries to pay for export orders in the last months of the year.

Source: Vitic/ congthuong.vn