Rice is a staple crop providing food self-sufficiency and security to more than 182 millions of people in the Mainland Southeast Asia (MSEA) countries of Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam. It is also an important commodity for domestic and international trade. As an economic commodity, rice plays a major role in international trade by bringing foreign currency revenues to rice exporting countries and food supply to meet the demand of rice deficit nations. As a political commodity, rice has been used to influence the market price artificially and create social, economic, and political instability, such as the global rice crisis in 2008.

The purpose of this chapter is to examine the rice trade opportunities and challenges for the MSEA countries. The chapter is divided into six main sections. The first three sections deal with Thailand, Vietnam, and Cambodia, three major rice exporters: backgrounds of their rice exports (1855–1999); their rice exports policies in the new millennium; and their rice export performances. The fourth section focuses on rice trade balance of the four MSEA countries, their competition, and their importing countries. The fifth section discusses rice cross border trade of the MSEA countries. The last section reviews the proposals of rice regional cooperation, or rice cartels, initiated by Thailand and Cambodia, and explains the reasons for their failures.