Harvesting rice in Buriram, Thailand (Source: AP)
Bangkok (VNA) – The National Rice
Policy Committee of Thailand, chaired by Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha, has
recently approved a mechanism to build rice barns in a bid to stabilise rice
price and facilitate
rice export.
The credit, worth about 1.67 billion THB
(55 million USD) will be allocated to support farmers and agricultural
institutes to build rice barns to store rice, delaying sales to stabilise the
price.
The scheme targets 10,000 borrowers,
while the government will help subsidise three percent of the annual interest
rate.
Boonyarit Kalayanamit, Director-General of
the Internal Trade Department, said of the loan amount, the Bank for
Agriculture and Agricultural Cooperatives (BAAC) will offer 150,000 THB to each
eligible farmer, and three million THB to each farm institute.
Boonyarit said the rice policy committee
also approved the plan to dispose of two million tonnes of state rice stocks
within this year. He insisted the disposal plan will not impact market prices
as only 40,000 tonnes of the total are edible, with the rest are fit for
animal feed production, and for fuel or energy production.
Since the current government of Thailand
came into power in May 2014, a total of 14.8 million tonnes of state rice
stocks have been sold through auctions, fetching 135 billion THB.
The Thai Rice Exporters Association
reported the country shipped 2.78 million tonnes of rice the first three months
this year, earning 44.09 billion THB, up 3.1 percent in volume and 9.5 percent
in value year-on-year.
Thailand was the world's rice top
exporter for January to March, followed by India with 2.59 million tonnes (down
20.8 percent), Pakistan with 1.2 million tonnes (up 38.9 percent), Vietnam with
1.05 million tonnes (down 20.5 percent), and the US 830,000 tonnes (down 19.1
percent).
The association reported rice shipments
dropped 9 percent in March to 864,938 tonnes, worth 13.78 billion THB, down 7.6
percent from the same month last year. The drop was largely due to lower
purchase orders on relatively high rice prices.-VNA
VNA