The Thai government has sold another 70,000 tonnes of rice from the 140,000 tonnes it planned to sell in its second tender in September, a senior commerce ministry official said on Monday. After the army took power in May and inspected rice stocks nation-wide, state warehouses were estimated to hold around 18 million tonnes of rice, about a fifth of which was unlikely to be sold as it was believed to be missing and rotten.
The government said it aimed to sell around 100,000 tonnes of rice from stocks monthly, to gradually cut burdensome storage costs without depressing global prices. "The 70,000 tonnes were awarded to 11 exporters who bid at prices close to market rates," said Duangporn Rodphaya, head of the commerce ministry's department of foreign trade, which oversees the government's sales of rice stocks.
The common grade Thai 5 percent broken white rice was offered at $440 per tonne. In the first tender in August, the government sold 73,000 tonnes of rice out of 167,000 tonnes on offer, due to low bids. Senior officials said the government is due to evaluate the quantity and quality of rice stocks next month to devise ways to deal with the grain and make up losses incurred by the previous government's money-guzzling rice buying scheme.
The rice support scheme helped bring former prime minister Yingluck Shinawatra to power in a landslide election in 2011 due to support from farmers, mostly in the remote areas of the country's north-east. However, the scheme backfired when the government failed to sell rice to pay arrears to angry farmers, leading to months of protests that ended in a military coup in May.
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