Rice tumbling as Thailand’s unpaid farmers urge reserve sale
Thailand, once the world’s biggest exporter, is short of funds to help growers under Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra’s 2011 program to buy the crop at above-market rates. After the government built record stockpiles big enough to meet about a third of global import demand, exports and prices have dropped, farmers aren’t being paid, and the program is the target of anti-corruption probes. Political unrest may contribute to slower growth in Southeast Asia’s second-largest economy. Selling the government inventory to pay farmers would flood the market with rice, eroding prices that in 2013 fell by the most in at least five years, and would escalate competition for shippers in Asia, including India, Vietnam and Cambodia. “The program is simply unsustainable and hurting the finances of the country,” said Concepcion Calpe, a senior economist in Rome for the United Nations’ Food & Agriculture Organization. “The suspension of the rice-pledging program will exacerbate the decline in Thai market prices as farmers enrolled in the program increasingly fail to be paid.” […]
Supunnabul Suwannakij and Chanyaporn Chanjaroen
http://www.businessweek.com/news/2014-02-11/rice-tumbling-as-thailand-s-unpaid-farmers-demand-stockpile-sale
