Vietnamese firms recently won a bid to sell 14,000 tons of rice to Japan, according to a local trade agency on Thursday.

The commodity, including 11,000 tons of ordinary rice and 3,000 tons of sticky rice, have been priced, on average, at 422.5 U.S. dollars per ton, said the Trade Information Center under the Trade Ministry.

Local companies have so far this year inked contracts on supplying a total of more than 95,000 tons of rice to Japan, up from 79,024 tons in the whole 2005, said the center.

Vietnam is expected to export over 5.2 million tons of the commodity valued at some 1.3 billion dollars this year, said the center.

Vietnam sold overseas more than 3.8 million tons of rice valued at over 1 billion dollars in the first eight months of this year, posting respective year-on-year decreases of 7.5 percent and 6.3 percent, according to the country's General Statistics Office.

The country, which shipped abroad more than 5.2 million tons of rice worth nearly 1.4 billion dollars in 2005, has set targets of producing 38-39 million tons of paddy rice in 2006.

Source: Xinhua