Emergency meeting on rice
Cambodia’s beleaguered rice sector convened an emergency meeting on August 16 to tackle falling rice exports and help rice millers currently in financial doldrums due to severe shortage of funds to buy harvested rice from farmers to be milled for export. The Kingdom’s rice exports fell by 6.9 percent from 312,317 tons in the first seven months last year, to 292,277 tons in the same period this year, according to a report from the Secretariat of One Window Service for Rice Export Formality. Hean Vanhan, deputy general director of the department of agriculture, told Khmer Times on August 16 that the top agenda in the emergency meeting was the issue of falling rice exports. Hun Lak, CRF’s vice-president, told Khmer Times the current crisis in Cambodia’s rice sector was caused by domestic and external market factors.
