Hungary has accepted two million tonnes of grain into intervention as purchases speed up because more storage of adequate quality has been found, the Agriculture and Rural Development Office said on Tuesday. "Grain intervention became faster in the last couple of weeks, and of the four million tonnes offered, two million tonnes has been bought," Laszlo Rieger, the intervention director of the office, was quoted by news agency MTI as saying.
Rieger said the rate of acceptance had increased because more than 150,000 tonnes of storage had been offered each week since February. He did not specify whether the remaining two million tonnes had been rejected.
The Agriculture Ministry said late last month intervention would rise significantly in April because new government guarantees would free up stocks tied down by commercial loans.
"The result is all the more noteworthy because at the end of February there was only 700,000 tonnes of grain in intervention stores," Rieger was quoted as saying.
He said the government guarantees were helping to accelerate intervention, which he said would be wound up in two months.
"The task of the next period is to lay the foundations of grain intervention," he said. "The aim is to have six million tonnes worth of storage available by harvest time."
Hungarian Agriculture Minister Imre Nemeth was sacked on Monday in a shake-up over Hungary's grain mountain. Hungary has offered more into the EU's intervention system than any other in the 25-nation bloc after a record crop of 16.7 million tonnes last year.
Nemeth said last week Hungary needed to build up to a million tonnes worth of new storage by the autumn. Farmers held several weeks of rallies in the capital last month for prompter payment of EU subsidies.
Farmers said the late subsidy payments were translating into cash-flow problems endangering spring sowing and the government admitted much of Hungary's grain storage was outdated and leaky.
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