Hanoi - If Vietnam's farmers are unhappy that their bumper harvests are driving down the price of rice, they should direct their complaints to plant scientist Dr Bui Chi Buu, who won the a prestigious international rice science award on Wednesday.

Buu's work on improving rice strains helped turn Vietnam from an impoverished rice importer to the world's second-largest rice exporter - from basket case to breadbasket.

"Dr Buu has seen the country grow from one of the world's largest rice importers in the 1970s to one of the largest exporters now," said plant breeder David Mackill of the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines. "There is no doubt that his work has played a large part in Vietnam's rice success."

The IRRI gave Buu its Senadhira Rice Research Award for his decades of work developing rice strains with higher salt tolerance and resistance to fungus, bacteria and brown planthoppers, an insect that can devastate rice crops.

Vietnam's reform of its rice farming sector in the early 1980s was its first move in liberalizing its once doctrinaire Soviet-style socialist economy. The move prompted huge increases in productivity and turned the once famine-plagued country into the world's second largest rice exporter by the 1990s.

The success of market-based reforms in the rice sector led to the country's adoption of a broad free-market economic policy in 1986, known as "doi moi." The reforms have underpinned Vietnam's sterling economic growth, which has averaged over 7 per cent a year since 2001.

In November, another Vietnamese scientist involved in the rice reforms, Dr Vo Tong Xuan, received an award from the South-East Asian Regional Centre for Graduate Study and Research in Agriculture for his role.

Vietnam expects to export some 5 million tons of rice in 2008. Harvests this summer and autumn were so abundant that farmers are having difficulty finding buyers.

The price of Vietnamese rice on the world market leapt to nearly 1,000 dollars per ton in May, after the government, fearing a worldwide shortage, limited exports to 3.5 million tons for the year. The export block was lifted in June, and prices dropped to just over 500 dollars per ton in October, leading to economic hardship for many farmers.

On Tuesday Vietnam's government authorized the country's state-owned food export companies to buy 1 million tons of rice in the Mekong Delta and store it for export. (dpa)