NEW DELHI, March 28: India has raised the minimum price for non-basmati rice exports to $1,000 per tonne from $650 per tonne free-on-board, the commerce ministry said, in a move to slow down overseas sales, report agencies.

The Directorate General of Foreign Trade, an arm of the commerce ministry, said in a notification dated March 27 on its Web site that the floor price for exports has been raised to 40,000 rupees or $1,000 a tonne.

The government has been trying to discourage rice exports to rein in rising domestic prices.

India had banned exports of all non-basmati rice on Oct. 9, but two weeks later relented to protests from traders and allowed sales at a floor price of $425 a tonne, which has since been successively raised.

The price for aromatic Basmati rice was raised to $1,100 a ton.

Record prices are threatening food security in rice-buying nations from the Philippines to Nigeria, and are driving up costs for producers including Anheuser-Busch Cos., the biggest U.S. buyer of the grain, and cereal maker Kellogg Co. Vietnam, China and Egypt are restricting rice exports, and South Korea will release grain from state-controlled reserves to cool prices.

``Not just India but governments across the globe are taking steps to keep prices of staple foods under control,'' said Atul Chaturvedi, president of Adani Enterprises Ltd., India's biggest private exporter of farm goods. ``It's clearly the result of the fight for food and fuel.''

The Food and Agriculture Organisation said in February that 36 nations including China face food emergencies this year. World rice stockpiles may total 72.1 million metric tons by end of July, the lowest since 1984, the U.S. Department of Agriculture said.

Rough rice prices have almost doubled on the Chicago Board of Trade in the past year. Rice for delivery in May rose as much as 48 cents, or 2.5 percent, to a record $19.785 per 100 pounds in Chicago today. Wheat reached $13.495 a bushel on Feb. 27, its highest-ever.

``Food prices all over the world are going through the roof and so spread the risk of social unrest,'' investor Jim Rogers said in Singapore today. ``It doesn't matter where, everybody has to pay higher prices for food and that's causing a problem.''

Consumer prices in China, the world's fastest-growing major economy, soared to 8.7 percent in February, the fastest pace in 11 years. In Thailand, prices jumped the most in 20 months, and in Vietnam, inflation is its highest in more than a decade.

Rising prices and shortages of food staples have been felt outside Asia. In Argentina, farmers blocked highways and access to ports and warehouses to protest rising export taxes, leading to a shortage of meat. The nation is the world's second-largest corn exporter and the third-largest soybean supplier.

The Philippines, the world's biggest rice buyer, may reduce the import tax on the grain to as little as 10 percent from 50 percent, Finance Secretary Gary Teves said in an interview today. Sri Lanka scraped customs duty on rice imports, the state-owned Daily News reported today.

Vietnam lowers rice export target

Meanwhile another report from Hanoi adds, Vietnam has cut its 2008 rice export target to 3.5-4 million tons from its initial goal of 4- 4.5 million tons to ensure the country's food security, according to local newspaper Labor today.

The Vietnamese government has also asked businesses to temporarily sign new rice export contracts. Local firms have inked contracts of shipping abroad 1.8 million tons of rice this year.

Vietnam, the world's second biggest rice exporter after Thailand, is estimated to export 859, 000 tons of rice worth 366 million U.S. dollars in the first quarter of this year, posting respective year-on-year rises of 5.3 percent and 42.6 percent, according to the country's General Statistics Office.

It sold overseas 4.5 million tons of rice worth nearly 1.5 billion dollars, mainly to the Philippines, Malaysia, Cuba, Indonesia and Japan, in 2007.