Rice production in Colombia has been damaged by severe drought and floods in various regions of the country, but output is expected to rise in the 2021-22 season. This emerged in a recent report by the Foreign Agricultural Service of the US Department of Agriculture (USDA).
Colombia produced a total of 9.48 million tonnes of rice in the 2020-21 season. The USDA forecasts production rising to 9.61 million tonnes in 2021-22.
Exports expected to fall
Colombia's rice exports to European Union (EU) countries and other major markets have fallen. Rising exports to China and Vietnam in the first eight months of the 2020-21 season have balanced this out, however. The USDA forecasts rice exports of 1.6 million tonnes in 2020-21, but exports could fall to 1.41 million tonnes in 2021-22. The USDA attributes the decline to slower government and cross-border trade.
Colombia's rice production has long been battered by drought. According to government data, severe drought from 2015 to 2019 damaged one million hectares of the country's rice land, of which 201,490 hectares lost their production capacity entirely.
Source: Bonik Barta. First published in Bengali on The Agro News.
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