Last week, China’scentral bank reduced the interest rate of one-year loans by 0.4percentage point to 5.6% and this will enable more Chinese companies totake out loans to import rubber latex and other farm produce forstockpiling.
An executive of an agricultural product trading firmbased in Ho Chi Minh City told the Daily that the Chinese centralbank’s interest rate cut will place a positive impact on the world’sfarm produce market in the short term as the reduction is an opportunityfor more Chinese firms to borrow money for goods and material imports.
Theexecutive said there are signs that Chinese companies have increasedrubber latex imports for storage in Qingdao city in the east of China.
Floodingin Thailand could affect the global supply of rubber latex and push upthe price of this product worldwide in the coming time.
“Theprice of rubber latex will likely pick up in the short term and the risewill depend on supply and demand,” the executive was quoted as saying.“As supply is higher than demand on the global market currently, theprice is unlikely to rise sharply.”
This week, a kilogramme ofRSS3 rubber sheets is sold at 27,800 VND in southeast and CentralHighlands provinces and the respective prices of SVR10 and SVR3L stay at22,700 VND and 27,600 VND. These prices are the same to the levels overthe weekend.
On Japan’s commodity exchange Tocom, last weekend’srubber price was quoted at the lowest level in the past seven weeks.The rubber price was around 190.5 yen per kilogramme (some 34,400 VND)for deliveries next month, up 0.2 yen, and 194 yen (around 35,000 VND)for deliveries in January.
Higher demand has also lifted pepperprices on the domestic market. Traders on November 25 bought akilogramme of pepper at around 194,000-200,000 VND, up 1,000-2,000 VNDagainst the previous day.
The average export price of pepper in the January-September period was 7,558 USD per tonne, rising by 14 percent year-on-year.
Statisticsof the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development showed thatVietnam shipped 145,000 tonnes of pepper worth over 1.1 billion USD inthe first ten month of this year, up 18.5 percent in volume and over 35percent in value year-on-year.
According to the Vietnam PepperAssociation (VPA), local farmers harvested around 150,000 tonnes ofpepper in the 2013-2014 crop.-VNA