Crop products and commodities

The 3.6 hectares in southern Vietnam that double as rice paddy and shrimp pond for farmer Nguyen Thi Tam have become a wasteland. After the worst drought in 90 years, almost nothing grows. It’s not that easy to switch, said Nguyen Trung Kien, vice chairman of ...

Exports of Lao bananas have grown tenfold from more than 30.8 billion kip in 2011-12 to more than 324.8 billion kip in 2014-15, a recent report revealed. According to preliminary research findings by the National Agriculture and Forestry Research Institute on the commercial production of bananas ...

“We need to restructure the agricultural sector since we can no longer rely on the current four major farm products — rice, rubber, tapioca and sugar cane– as the government must always subsidise these product because their prices fluctuate,” Finance Minister Apisak Tantivorawong has said.  Keep ...

In Ca Mau, about 10,000 prawn-rice hectares suffered heavy damage, 3,000 hectares of which were totally lost and the rest lost 70 percent and above of crops. U Minh, Tran Van Thoi and Thoi Binh districts suffered the heaviest losses. In Tien Giang, the Irrigation and Flood ...

The Lao National Rubber Association will be established sometime this year in order to help provide a sustainable income for rubber growers. Many rubber growers, especially in the northern provinces, have been struggling with the low price of rubber on the world market and the limited ...

Taing Chhung Ngy, director of market promotion at rice exporter LBN Angkar (Kampuchea), said that March’s sub-par performance was just the first indicator that the sector’s growth was decelerating. The decreasing amount of rice exports in March shows that the issues that rice millers and exporters ...

A 30-month study by Vietnamese researchers on the impact of 11 proposed hydroelectric dams in the Lower Mekong Basin has found that the economic damage to Cambodia alone will be worth some $450 million per year. According to the researchers, the Mekong River at Kratie could, ...

The El Nino weather phenomenon has played havoc with crops across Southeast Asia and beyond. Thailand, the world’s second-largest sugar exporter, will ship 20% less of the sweetener to international markets this year than last, and farmers fear the damage already inflicted on young cane ...

Many local farmers in Laos’s Phongsaly province are shifting to plant cardamom, after earning lucrative income from growing this crop and selling it to Chinese traders. Some families earned as much as 40 million kip per year from growing cardamom, which enabled them to send their ...

Vietnam plans to gradually reduce rice production and switch to other more profitable crops, a plan that experts say makes sense since the country grows so much paddy and is a massive exporter of the unprofitable crop. The National Assembly’s Economic Committee recently agreed with the ...