Harvesting rice in Buriram, Thailand (Source: AP)
Bangkok (VNA) – The National RicePolicy Committee of Thailand, chaired by Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha, hasrecently approved a mechanism to build rice barns in a bid to stabilise riceprice and facilitate rice export.
The credit, worth about 1.67 billion THB(55 million USD) will be allocated to support farmers and agriculturalinstitutes to build rice barns to store rice, delaying sales to stabilise theprice.
The scheme targets 10,000 borrowers,while the government will help subsidise three percent of the annual interestrate.
Boonyarit Kalayanamit, Director-General ofthe Internal Trade Department, said of the loan amount, the Bank forAgriculture and Agricultural Cooperatives (BAAC) will offer 150,000 THB to eacheligible farmer, and three million THB to each farm institute.
Boonyarit said the rice policy committeealso approved the plan to dispose of two million tonnes of state rice stockswithin this year. He insisted the disposal plan will not impact market pricesas only 40,000 tonnes of the total are edible, with the rest are fit foranimal feed production, and for fuel or energy production.
Since the current government of Thailandcame into power in May 2014, a total of 14.8 million tonnes of state ricestocks have been sold through auctions, fetching 135 billion THB.
The Thai Rice Exporters Associationreported the country shipped 2.78 million tonnes of rice the first three monthsthis year, earning 44.09 billion THB, up 3.1 percent in volume and 9.5 percentin value year-on-year.
Thailand was the world's rice topexporter for January to March, followed by India with 2.59 million tonnes (down20.8 percent), Pakistan with 1.2 million tonnes (up 38.9 percent), Vietnam with1.05 million tonnes (down 20.5 percent), and the US 830,000 tonnes (down 19.1percent).
The association reported rice shipmentsdropped 9 percent in March to 864,938 tonnes, worth 13.78 billion THB, down 7.6percent from the same month last year. The drop was largely due to lowerpurchase orders on relatively high rice prices.-VNA
Harvesting rice in Buriram, Thailand (Source: AP) 
