Workers at milled rice warehouse in Kandal Province are carrying rice into stok pile for milling. Photograph: Pha Lina/Phnom Penh Post

Canadia Bank will launch a rice mill in Cambodia’s Takeo province in October, a move that insiders said could help curb the flow of unmilled rice to neighbouring Vietnam.

Bank officials yesterday said they will buy US$3 million in milling equipment, and the total cost of the facility was expected to be $10 million.

Equipment would be imported from several countries including Japan, Taiwan and China, and the mill would look to export to the European Union, China and the Philippines.

The plant would have a capacity of 600 tonnes of milled rice per day by 2013, Bun Khim, rice milling manager at Canadia Bank, said yesterday, adding that operation procedures were still unknown because the factory was in the planning stages. “Now we don’t know how to operate the plant because we are preparing the machines,” he said.

Doung Heng, the president of Takeo province’s Rice Millers Association, said that  the operation of Canadia Bank’s rice milling  would not be a competitive force among local rice millers, but it would curb the flow of unmilled rice to Vietnam.

“The operation is good for reducing the amount of unmilled rice to neighbouring countries. We cannot stop exporting paddy all at once, but we can reduce it by means of investment.”

To contact the reporter on this story: Rann Reuy at [email protected]