Exports of the staple crop have been buoyant over the last year, but a more recent weakening of demand and worsening local conditions present a tough outlook for farmers.
By FRONTIER
Besides the usual challenges of weather, pests and fluctuating markets faced by farmers everywhere, rice growers and traders in Myanmar also have to contend with raging conflict, border closures and erratic policies from the military junta.
It may therefore come as a surprise that, in the fiscal year ending on March 31, the country is on track to record its highest rice exports since the 2021 military coup.
According to the Myanmar Rice Federation, which works closely with the military regime, Myanmar exported 2.3 million tonnes in the first 11 months of the 2024-25 fiscal year, earning US$1.08 billion. That marks a significant increase on the previous year’s 1.7 million tonnes of exports, worth $800 million.
It also puts Myanmar on course for its best year for rice exports since the 2.5 million tonnes of 2019-20, before the COVID-19 pandemic and the coup wrecked the economy.
Official data in Myanmar should be treated with caution, given the regime’s propensity for crude propaganda and insistence that the business community toes its line. However, export figures can be checked against data from importing countries, and it appears that strong international demand and the junta’s relaxation of its own draconian currency controls have aided a genuine export rebound.
Yet, export figures from 2025 so far suggest this boom is tailing off. Moreover, interviews with rice sector insiders reveal that many farmers and traders haven’t benefitted from the export surge, partly due to a parallel collapse in overland trade. Although most of Myanmar’s rice is exported by sea from Yangon, border trade – particularly with China – sustains many farmers and traders who live far from ports, and this trade is often informal or undercounted in official figures. Moreover, most of Myanmar’s rice is consumed domestically, where weak demand has squeezed farmers who are paying high input and labour costs. Recent junta regulations, meanwhile, have marginalised small traders and enabled local monopolies by big businessmen.
The health of the sector determines the livelihoods and sustenance of millions of people in Myanmar, where rice is the most important staple crop. It also provides valuable export revenue for the regime. Although the junta has lost swathes of territory to resistance forces since the coup, it still controls prime cultivating areas such as Ayeyarwady Region, a fertile river delta.
When it comes to rice exports, Myanmar has long fallen short of its potential. It hovers around eighth in the global league of rice exporters, accounting for some 3.5 percent of the total market – a far cry from the 1930s when it ranked first. Exports are also under the 4 million tonne target that the MRF had set for 2020-21, before COVID blew such ambitions off course. The coup then put paid to any hope of a quick recovery.
MRF President U Ye Min Aung said the bump in export numbers over the past year is partly explained by transient global factors, which already appear to be shifting. “Many countries were holding elections in 2024 and purchasing food supplies in advance,” he told Frontier. As a result, he said, “Foreign demand for rice was strong in 2024. Every rice-exporting country has been able to sell large quantities.”
Eight of the world’s 10 most populous nations held elections in 2024, including Indonesia, which last year overtook China as Myanmar’s biggest customer, buying more than 800,000 tonnes.
However, Ye Min Aung said the junta’s decision to allow rice exporters to keep more of their foreign income was also an important factor behind the rebound.
To shore up its dwindling foreign reserves, the junta in August 2022 mandated that exporters convert 65pc of their foreign currency earnings into kyat at the official rate set by the Central Bank. Because the official rate is considerably worse than the open market rate, this policy amounted to a hefty unofficial tax on exports. The requirement has been progressively reduced over the past 18 months, to 50pc in July 2023, then 35pc in December 2023, and finally to 25pc in August last year.
“Some exporters stopped trading because of the previous exchange rate policies. When the government reduced [the exchange requirement] to 25pc, many exporters were able to resume operations,” Ye Min Aung said. “It was a great boost for exporters.”
Floods and fighting
In its February 2025 global rice report, the United States Department of Agriculture estimated Myanmar’s rice exports at 2.8 million tonnes, the largest since 2017. It also said Myanmar was presently the biggest exporter of rice to the European Union. However, the report forecast a fall in Myanmar’s exports this year.
Sure enough, the MRF data show a sharp decline in exports since December, although Ye Min Aung said the federation is sticking with its annual export target of between 2.2 and 2.5 million tonnes.
The new export slump is largely due to weakened demand for Myanmar’s rice. In recent months the world’s biggest rice exporter, India, has been trying to boost its economy by relaxing export controls, which were previously aimed at stabilising its domestic supply and prices. The effect has been to flood the global market and depress prices.
However, the supply in Myanmar has also been hit. Rice sector sources told Frontier that the earlier export surge had mostly been fed by the “summer” crop in 2024, whose stocks take a while to find their way into foreign markets. This crop, which is planted and harvested during the dry months of the year, is one of two in Myanmar’s agricultural calendar. The other is the “monsoon” crop, planted during the rainy season that starts in May and harvested later in the year.
This monsoon crop was hit by severe, widespread flooding caused by Typhoon Yagi in September last year, as well as by the expanding conflict between the military and resistance forces – especially in the central Dry Zone.
U Tun Shwe, a farmer in Madaya Township in Mandalay Region with 15 acres of paddy fields, was unable to grow monsoon paddy last year due to a lack of water from the Sedawgyi dam, which was captured by the Mandalay People’s Defence Force in a major offensive in July.
The PDF’s seizure of the military outpost guarding the dam meant there was no longer any staff to release water. The dam’s gates remained closed, depriving about 60,000 acres of paddy fields across Madaya, Patheingyi and Amarapura townships of irrigation, Tun Shwe told Frontier, asking to be identified by a pseudonym for his safety.
“I lost about K30 million last year because I was unable to grow monsoon paddy,” he said.
More catastrophic was Typhoon Yagi, which the junta said inundated more than 750,000 acres of farmland, particularly in the regions of Mandalay, Bago and Ayeyarwady, destroying much of the monsoon crop. The actual damage was likely far more extensive.
Taking into account the regime’s diminishing authority, just how many acres are put to paddy across Myanmar remains uncertain. The Ministry of Commerce has issued doubtful data showing total acreage of some 17.3 million acres of summer and monsoon paddy in 2024, little changed from 2023 or even before the coup.
Ye Min Aung of the MRF noted that Myanmar only exports around 20pc of its total rice production, and that this is mostly from summer paddy, which did well last year.
Farmer Tun Shwe says he relies on getting higher yields from his summer crop. “If an acre of summer paddy yields 100 baskets, an acre of monsoon paddy only yields 75 baskets,” he said, relieved that he could harvest all his summer rice last year before fighting affected management of the dam.
Border blockages
Meanwhile, the shutdown of most overland trade with China in the last year has knocked out a major segment of the rice market.
In October 2023, the Three Brotherhood Alliance of ethnic armed groups launched Operation 1027 in northern Shan State and went on to seize control of several border towns from the military. While China reportedly facilitated the launch of the operation, last year it closed most of the border crossings to put pressure on Brotherhood members, who had seized more territory than it could tolerate.
A rice trader from the border town of Muse in northern Shan said the conflict and closures had forced him to stop his export business and move away.
“I no longer live in Muse or export rice. The situation in Muse isn’t good. I don’t get any information about rice anymore, and I don’t intend to switch to shipping by sea,” he said, asking not to be named.
U Sai Kyaw, a Mandalay-based rice trader, said he had had a similar experience: “I used to export rice to China through the border. But I haven’t been able to export rice since the border routes were closed a while ago, so I stopped.”
Total overland exports of rice officially fell to around 22,000 tonnes in the first 11 months of this fiscal year from over 100,000 tonnes in 2023-24, according to the MRF. However, the often informal nature of border trade means much of it goes uncounted.
Ye Min Aung said that, regardless, the closures have had a limited impact on overall rice exports because most trade happens by sea. However, that is little consolation for many farmers and traders in central and northern Myanmar.
“Exporters in Mandalay have to ship goods from Mandalay to Yangon by truck and then export by sea. It takes a long time and costs a lot, so there are fewer exporters here than before. Only Yangon traders focus on exports,” a member of the Mandalay Region Chamber of Commerce and Industry told Frontier.
But a Yangon-based rice trader said even in the country’s commercial capital the export market had already started to cool this year, for the reasons described above.
“This year the foreign market has fallen. Exporters are not making much profit at the moment. India is selling rice too,” he said. He also noted shifting global trends towards parboiled rice, a more specialised product that Myanmar cannot produce in large quantities or to adequate standards due to limited milling and production capacity.
New monopolies
Meanwhile, tighter regulations on domestic traders, millers and wholesalers are pushing some of them to the margins.
The junta had previously ordered that as of November 2023 any business storing over 50 tonnes of rice, or 5,000 baskets of paddy, was required to register on the Myanmar Rice Online (MyRo) website. In October last year the threshold was reduced to 25 tonnes, while registration fees range from K50,000 to K200,000 depending on the size of the warehouse. The new system, the regime said, is meant to ensure an adequate supply, prevent hoarding and stabilise prices. Failure to comply can result in suspension of business licences and registrations.
Ye Min Aung said there are currently about 4,000 registered warehouses. They don’t include the facility run by Ko Kyaw, a rice trader in a village in Ayeyarwady’s Danubyu Township who asked not to use his real name for safety reasons. He told Frontier he can store about 20,000 baskets of paddy, but he and many other small-scale traders are refusing to register out of distrust for the junta. He wouldn’t elaborate, but registration requires sharing information about operations and capacity that the regime could later use to squeeze tax out of industry players.
However, the risk of going unregistered is creating chronic uncertainty that hurts business and deflates prices. Rice millers and traders, Ko Kyaw said, “no longer have the confidence to stock up as they did before, nor do they feel secure buying large quantities of rice from farmers”.
Due to weak compliance, the junta set a December 2024 deadline for registering rice stores and began making inspections that month. Ko Kyaw said that as a result, the price of paddy fell to K1.5 million per 100 baskets from K1.9 million because traders largely stopped buying.
With traders like him holding back, Ko Kyaw said a company called Gold Delta has become the only major buyer of rice in his village. The company is owned by the Eden Group conglomerate, which remains a major economic player despite its chairman U Chit Khine being arrested by the junta in 2022 on corruption charges.
Ko Kyaw explained, “Before I would buy rice from a farmer and store it. If I got a good offer I would sell it on to bigger buyers from the nearest town. The market was free. But now these buyers have mostly stopped working. There is only Gold Delta in the village, so I have to buy paddy from the farmer and immediately transfer it to Gold Delta. I only get the profit margin the company sets. I have become a broker rather than a trader.”
Ko Kyaw could try to transport rice to Yangon but this is expensive due to the fees demanded along the way. “We have to pass through numerous junta checkpoints, which adds significant costs. Even encountering a group of traffic police means paying about K5,000,” he said.
Meanwhile rice millers in Yangon, already struggling with electricity outages, are also complaining about the tougher regulations.
“The government is inspecting rice storage facilities to gather information, and maybe its goal is to regulate those who hoard rice and manipulate market prices,” commented one miller in an industrial zone. “But this is really creating challenges for the industry.”
