[PHNOM PENH POST]
A nationwide survey was under way by the Ministry of Commerce’s Rice
Exporter Union to measure Cambodia’s milled-rice industry in order to
give international buyers an accurate picture of the Kingdom’s current
capacity, insiders said yesterday.
Although data for the survey
was still being collected, those insiders pointed to Cambodia’s
well-known problems such as a lack of agricultural processing capacity
and inferior rice-seed quality.
Rice Exporter Union chairman
Thon Virak, who also serves as general director of the state-owned Green
Trade Company, said poor seed quality was a big impediment to
attracting foreign buyers.
Those buyers sought the
highest-quality seeds, as the rice harvested from them offered the
smallest risk of breaking, he said. Unbroken rice fetches a higher price
on the international market.
“We have the right amount of rice
output, but investors are worried about the seeds,” Thon Virak said.
“There are a lot of unpurified seeds in Cambodia that break a lot.”
Overall
milling capacity had been, and continued to be, an issue, Thon Virak
said, despite growth since Prime Minister Hun Sen last year announced
the goal of exporting a mill-ion tonnes of milled rice by 2015.
Data
collection already completed in Prey Veng, Banteay Meanchey and
Battambang showed 20 milling machines in operation, processing between
five and 30 tonnes of milled rice an hour, Thon Virak said.
The remaining survey results would be released early in 2012 once all the country's provinces had been covered, he said.
Yang
Saing Koma, president of the Cambodia Centre for Study and Development
in Agriculture, said seed selection was crucial to helping the Kingdom
reach its 2015 export goal, as most target markets sought out
higher-quality fragrant rice.
Many Cambodian farmers chose not to plant fragrant rice because its output was below that of other seeds, Yang Saing Koma said.
“People
need to grow seeds with more output to support their families,” he
said, although the number of farmers planting fragrant rice has grown
over the past few years.
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