Cooperative Market Strategy for the Rice Industry Forum

Project Titile: Cooperative Market Strategy for the Rice Industry

Date: 3,4 November 2018

Place: Sunshine Hotel, Mawlamyine, Mon State, Southern Part of Myanmar

The world has been suffering the consequences of climate change year by year. Somewhere drought, floods, storms respectively. In 2018, heavy rainfall occurred over Myanmar. It leaded to hazards especially flooding all around Myanmar. These disastrous floods caused the ruin of paddy fields. The floods happen beforehand, rice amount is enough for domestic consumption. But after the floods, the needed rice amount for domestic indicates the warning point. It has threatened the livelihood of farmers and rice sector have shown deficit.

Therefore, we set up this forum by three ways approach to promote rice sector development:

• To implement Myanmar’s rice export market
• To promote and exchange rice production technology
• To engage among policy makers, paddy farmers and rice manufacturing business groups in the whole Myanmar

This forum is the first and foremost state level rice and paddy forum all around Myanmar. In paddy growing rankings, Ayeyarwaddy Region the first; Sagaing Second and Mon State stands third orderly. We were able to captivate the participants from different regions with different sectors. The participants were the government officials, private sector business owners, banks, companies and the grass root level implementer. These people had a chance to communicate frankly and share their experiences each other as a part of forum section. The result that the participants achieved that the forum objectives lead to export market strategy, and there were many challenges to overcome such as logistics, supply chain, technology and incentives to the farmers.  In short, the combination of the explanation of policy makers, the challenges of implementer and the adopters’ challenges in the real situation highlighted the way to approach current issues and solved the rice and paddy sector barriers to some extent.

Myanmar Rice and Paddy Market Strategy forum was organized according as the instruction of Mon State government in cooperation with Myanmar Rice Millers’ Association and Myanmar Rice Traders’ Association. In addition, CB Bank, AYA Bank and Myanmar New Ayeyar Co., Ltd involved as technical support partners and KUBOTA as dinner and filed trip sponsor.

Main participants were : Mon State Government, Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock and Irrigation, Agriculture Department (Mon State), Ministry of Commerce – Consumer Affairs Department (Mon State), Myanmar Trade Promotion Organization (Ramanya Trade Center), Ministry of Industry, Directorate of Industrial Supervision and Inspection – Small and Medium Enterprises Development Department (Mon State), Myanmar Rice Federation, Myanmar Rice Millers Association, Myanmar Rice Traders Association, Mon State Rice Millers Association, Mon State Rice Traders Association, State and Regional Manager Office – Agriculture Department (Yangon Region, Ayeyarwaddy Region, Bago Region, Mandalay Region, Sagaing Region), Internal Revenue Department, Natural Resource and Environment Conservation Department, Directorate of Investment and Company Administration, Department of Planning, Cooperative Department, Department of Agricultural Land Management and Statistics, General Administration Department, Rice Millers Association/Rice Traders Association (Yangon Region, Ayeyarwaddy Region, Bago Region, Mandalay Region, Sagaing Region, Tanintharyi Region, Karen State), Paddy Producers Association (Mon State), Pa-O National Business Groups, Myanmar Economic Bank, Myanmar Agricultural Development Bank, Farmer Groups.