Under the Vietnam-EU Free Trade Agreement effective from August 1, the EU pledges to provide an annual rice quota of 80,000 tonnes to Vietnam and completely liberalise trade in broken rice. After three to five years, tariffs on rice products will be slashed to zero percent. At present, the EU’s import tariffs for Vietnamese rice is 175 EUR (198 USD) per tonne of milled rice and 65 EUR per tonne of broken rice. Meanwhile, the EU also sets a range of conditions for those quotas such as origin certificates on Vietnamese rice. The rice exported to EU must have authenticity certificates issued by Vietnamese authorities. Vietnam earned 1.71 billion USD from exporting nearly 3.5 million tonnes of rice in the first half of this year, up 18 percent in value and 4.4 percent in volume year-on-year./.