"Last month it was still possible to buy several thousand tonnes but now no exporters dare take a single new order," said a trader with a foreign firm in Ho Chi Minh City.
Last month the government ordered exporters to stop signing new contracts until the end of November while trade ministry officials surveyed September's typhoon crop damage in the north.
Hanoi is to announce later this month whether it will lift the ban. This week Typhoon Kai-Tak battered several Central Provinces. No estimates on crop losses were available.
There are concerns of food shortages in the five provinces in the impoverished central region, which have already been hit by floods over the past two weeks.
In the first sign of food relief, the government has ordered 450 tonnes of rice from the national food reserves to be sent into the region. Traders in Ho Chi Minh City said a major rice deal with Indonesia involving 300,000 tonnes could be loaded from next week, at the earliest.
Viand 2, Vietnam's biggest rice exporter, will undertake the contract and several affiliated food companies have been given allocations, a trader said.
Last month Vietnamese officials told Reuters shipments for Indonesia would be this month and in December. Indonesian officials could not be immediately reached for comment.
Also, the Vietnamese government said it has agreed to sell 200,000 tonnes to Cuba next year. Vietnam has exported 4.61 million tonnes of rice in the first 10 months, up 30 percent on a year, government figures showed.
Deals signed this year with the Philippines alone totalled 1.8 million tonnes, the trade ministry said. Of the five vessels loading this week at the Saigon port, two were bound for the Philippines with a combined 12,000 tonnes.
The other three vessels will leave for Cuba and Africa. Another five vessels have finished loading nearly 84,000 tonnes for Africa and Japan.
With the export ban, export offers remain static. The 5 percent broken rice stood at $256-$257 a tonne, free-on-board basis, against $256-$258 last week. The 25-percent broken rice was also stable at $230-$231 a tonne, from $230-$232 a week ago.