Vietnam’s government yesterday said the country has sufficient rice stocks and threatened to punish speculators who hoard rice for profit after price surges triggered a run on the staple grain.
Many supermarkets and street stalls quickly ran out of rice in Ho Chi Minh City at the weekend as thousands of consumers, worried by rumors of looming shortages, queued to stock up on rice, further driving up retail prices.
Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung in an urgent message to all cities and provinces said that Vietnam, the world’s number-two rice exporter, has enough stocks to meet domestic and export demand amid record global rice prices.
The prime minister, whose government has been battling double-digit inflation driven by food and energy prices for months, warned traders of “severe punishment” if they hoard rice and speculate on the commodity for profit.
The government “strictly forbids organizations and individuals without function to trade food from buying paddy and rice for speculation,” said an official statement, following reports that investors had bought up rice stocks and refused to sell them while waiting for prices to climb even further.
The warnings came after sudden price increases from Saturday morning sent shoppers rushing to supermarkets, especially in the country’s largest city, amid what local media dubbed “rice fever.”
Shoppers and restaurant owners were piling large stacks of 10kg rice bags onto their motorcycles, while at least one supermarket chain, Saigon Co-op, limited sales to one bag per customer.
The Thanh Nien daily reported that, within several hours on Saturday, the price of 1kg of standard rice surged from 10,000 to 18,000 dong (US$0.63 to US$1.13) in many retail outlets, further fueling the run.
In other southern towns, including the Mekong delta hub of Can Tho, prices also went up fast, while some distributors stockpiling rice and turning away customers who then went to buy up noodles instead, media reports said.
Dung assured officials and citizens that “rice production of your country in 2008 can completely meet domestic consumption, and part of it can be exported.”
The government said last week it had stopped new rice export contracts until the end of June, despite a bumper harvest in the Mekong Delta, the main rice basket, to ensure food security and fight inflation.
Dung earlier capped this year’s national rice exports at 3.5 million tonnes, down from a previous target of 4.5 million tonnes, while Vietnam has honored export contracts, including shipments to rice-deficit country like the Philippines.
World grain prices have sky-rocketed, a trend blamed on higher energy and fertilizer costs, greater global demand, droughts, the loss of farmland to biofuel plantations, industry and cities, and on price speculation.
Vietnamese consumer prices have risen by more than 17 percent in the first four months of this year year-on-year, fueling popular anger and labor unrest.
Jonathan Pincus, the UN Development Program’s chief economist in Vietnam, said the country’s problem with rice was due to prices, not supplies.
“Vietnam is a food exporting country, where there is no problem of supplies,” Pincus said. “There are problems of prices, and higher prices hurt particularly people working for wages.”
“It’s very natural to see strikes and higher wage demands because people’s money is not going as far as it used to,” he said.
Pincus said he did not foresee food riots.
But Vietnam’s government knows “that some of the gains made in poverty reduction over the past 10 years are in jeopardy if they are not able to bring food prices into line,” he said.
Taiwan would remain in the same international network for carrying out cross-border payments and would not be marginalized on the world stage, despite jostling among international powers, central bank Governor Yang Chin-long (楊金龍) said yesterday. Yang made the remarks during a speech at an annual event organized by Financial Information Service Co (財金資訊), which oversees Taiwan’s banking, payment and settlement systems. “The US dollar will remain the world’s major cross-border payment tool, given its high liquidity, legality and safe-haven status,” Yang said. Russia is pushing for a new cross-border payment system and highlighted the issue during a BRICS summit in October. The existing system
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) is expected to grow its revenue by about 25 percent to a new record high next year, driven by robust demand for advanced technologies used in artificial intelligence (AI) applications and crypto mining, International Data Corp (IDC) said yesterday. That would see TSMC secure a 67 percent share of the world’s foundry market next year, from 64 percent this year, IDC senior semiconductor research manager Galen Zeng (曾冠瑋) predicted. In the broader foundry definition, TSMC would see its market share rise to 36 percent next year from 33 percent this year, he said. To address concerns
Intel Corp chief financial officer Dave Zinsner said that a formal separation of the company’s factory and product development divisions is an open question that would be decided by the chipmaker’s next leader. Zinsner, who is serving as interim co-CEO following this month’s ouster of Pat Gelsinger, made the remarks on Thursday at the Barclays technology conference in San Francisco alongside co-CEO Michelle Johnston Holthaus. Intel’s struggles to keep pace with rivals — along with its deteriorating financial condition — have spurred speculation that the next CEO would make dramatic changes. That has included talk of a split of the company’s manufacturing
PROTECTIONISM: The tariffs would go into effect on Jan. 1 and are meant to protect the US’ clean energy sector from unfair Chinese practices, the US trade chief said US President Joe Biden’s administration plans to raise tariffs on solar wafers, polysilicon and some tungsten products from China to protect US clean energy businesses. The notice from the Office of US Trade Representative (USTR) said tariffs on Chinese-made solar wafers and polysilicon would rise to 50 percent from 25 percent and duties on certain tungsten products would increase from zero to 25 percent, effective on Jan. 1, following a review of Chinese trade practices under Section 301 of the US Trade Act of 1974. The decision followed a public comment period after the USTR said in September that it was considering
RSS