Thailand to sell rice in government-to-government deals

Thailand, the world's biggest rice exporter, plans to sell 950,000 tonnes of rice from its stocks through government-to-government deals by the end of 2009, the commerce minister said on Tuesday. "Our strategy is to drain rice out of the country in a bid to lift domestic prices during the harvesting season," Commerce Minister Porntiva Nakasai told reporters, referring to the year-end harvesting period.
The Commerce Ministry planned to release another 1.77 million tonnes of rice in 2010, she said. The government is estimated to have in its stockpiles the equivalent of 6 million tonnes of milled rice, bought from farmers in rice intervention schemes. "We plan to negotiate with several countries, including the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia and Iran," Porntiva said. On Monday, the Philippines said it was in talks to buy at least 250,000 tonnes of rice from Thailand in a government-to-government deal.
But Indonesia has said it was unlikely to import any rice next year. "We are more or less self-sufficient in terms of production. We haven't had to import in the last two years. The forecast production for this year still looks good," Indonesian Trade Minister Mari Pangestu told Reuters over the weekend on the sidelines of an East Asian summit in Thailand. Thailand was expected to produce around 23.5 million tonnes of rice from its main crop, but around 5 percent of that may have been damaged by recent floods.
The government had planned to end its rice-buying intervention in favour of a scheme under which it would subsidise farmers without buying grain itself. However, it has been forced to run both schemes in parallel in the face of farmers' protests. Traders were not surprised by the plans to sell stocks through government deals, but they doubted this could be done without depressing prices.
"I think the government has a very short period of time to sell 950,000 tonnes rice this year and that is bound to affect prices as the lot is quite big," Chookiat Ophaswongse, president of Thai Rice Exporters Association, told Reuters. Other traders agreed, saying demand was not likely to rise significantly in the near term.