The Strategy's First Birthday

A government strategy turned one year old last week, and as far as we know, nobody threw it a party.

We would have come. The Milled Rice Market Expansion and Export Diversification Strategy 2025-2030 is not a snappy name to put on a cake, but it is close to our hearts, because buried under those eight words is a one-line bet we recognized immediately. The Minister of Agriculture said it out loud at the launch: "Focusing on quality helps deliver better value for mills and direct profits to farmers."

That is not just a policy to us. That is a description of our company. Grow the premium crop, mill it ourselves, export it ourselves, and pass the quality premium back to the people who grew it. The ministry wrote it down last August. We have been living it in Kampong Thom for years. Reading your own business plan in a government document is a strange kind of compliment.

The birthday presents

Year one brought the strategy some spectacular gifts.

Cambodia exported 707,471 tonnes of milled rice in the first seven months of 2026, up 68 percent. Sixty-one companies shipped to 66 countries. And for the first time in this country's history, a million-tonne year is within reach. Some of those tonnes are ours, and we can add a present of our own: the ports, trucks, and paperwork all held up under volumes Cambodia has never moved before. Anyone who has waited at a border crossing with a full truck knows that was never guaranteed.

The awkward present

Every birthday has one gift nobody knows where to put.

Divide the money by the rice and the average exported tonne earned about 587 dollars this year, down from about 735 last year. Most of that is the world's doing. India came back to the market and prices fell everywhere, and plainer grades carried much of the new volume. We name the number because we would rather say it ourselves than have a buyer say it to us at a trade show.

But here is the thing about that number: it is precisely why the strategy exists. When the average falls, you want to be selling the rice that is not average.

The part that makes us smile

Premium fragrant rice was 59.2 percent of Cambodia's shipments this year. That is the end of the market where value holds when prices slide, and it is the only end where we play.

It is also the end that pays farmers best, and this is where the strategy stops being paperwork and starts being people. Our favourite proof is Mrs Sok Im, our best farmer in Kampong Thom, who converts good seasons into gold chains you can see across a field. Patrick, one of our directors, once asked her whether her husband had received any of the gold. No, she said. And she laughed.

That laugh is what "direct profits to farmers" sounds like in real life. We will take it over a press release any day.

Year two runs through Paris

There is homework too. Buyers increasingly want to trace a bag back to a province and a season, and our field records are not finished. We are on it.

And in October, the strategy's second year walks into SIAL Paris. White King Elephant will be there, near the federation's pavilion, with cooked samples and open bags. If you are there, come taste what the bet was about. We might even bring cake.