India supplies rival China with rice for the first time in 30 years

Audio 01:37

A woman stalls rice for drying in a rice mill on the outskirts of Kolkata, India.

REUTERS / Rupak De Chowdhuri

By: Claire Fages Follow

4 min

The border dispute between Beijing and New Delhi does not prevent trade.

For the first time in thirty years, China is buying rice from India, decidedly the cheapest supplier on the planet this year. 

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China has just bought 100,000 tonnes of broken rice from India for delivery between December and February.

A first in nearly thirty years.

All these years, China invoked reasons of insufficient quality of Indian rice.

But diplomacy was above all involved, relations between New Delhi and Beijing have never been good.

Chinese traditional suppliers absent

This year, despite the deadly clashes on the Himalayan border between the two Asian giants, China has been tempted by Indian rice.

Its production is stagnating.

And its traditional suppliers, Thailand, Vietnam, Burma, Pakistan do not have enough to export at a good price, their harvest was bad.

With only 6 million tonnes sold abroad this year, Thailand, once the world's largest exporter, is expected to be overtaken not only by India but also by Vietnam.

India could win its bet

India, on the other hand, has a lot of stocks to sell: 30 million tonnes of surplus, 50% more than two years ago.

India could succeed in its bet to export 14 million tonnes, a record, with the blessing of the authorities in New Delhi.

This highly subsidized rice, since part of the reserves for poor Indians are loaded into freighters, is at an unbeatable price: 300 to 350 dollars per ton, against 465 to 500 dollars for Thai or Vietnamese rice of the same quality.

Philippines, Indonesia and Africa also for purchases

" 

", summarizes Patricio Mendez del Villar, rice economist at CIRAD.

It is not the only one to benefit from the windfall since the Philippines, Indonesia and Africa are getting their rice supplies like never before from India, whose white grains will constitute half of African imports this year.

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