Thailand is willing to supply the Philippines rice in a government-to-government deal only if Manila faces a shortage of the staple, Prime Minister Samak Sundaravej said on Sunday.
"Only if they are going to run into shortage, like in three to six months away, they can let us know how many hundreds of thousands of tonnes of rice they need and we are happy to do a government-to-government deal at a friendly price," Samak said in a weekly television address.
"That would be similar to what we did with Malaysia," he said referring to 200,000 tonnes of rice Bangkok sold to Kuala Lumpur this month. The two governments were in talks about another 300,000 tonnes.
At least 10 countries, from Southeast Asia, the Middle East and Africa, have approached the government of Thailand, the world's top rice exporter, about buying the grain in government-to-government deals after fears of shortages triggered a near tripling of prices on the international market this year.
Thailand's 100 percent B grade white rice, considered the world benchmark, was quoted at $1,030-$1,050 per tonne earlier this week, close to a record high of $1,080 a tonne hit in April after some producer nations curbed exports to cool domestic inflation.
Alarmed at the soaring price of its national staple, the Philippines, the world's biggest rice importer, has been publicly courting neighbouring nations for guarantees of supply ahead of a traditional lean period in the third quarter. Earlier this week, Philippine President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo reiterated that request when she met Samak during an official visit to Manila.
But Samak said he had turned down Arroyo's call for a three-year supply contract. In March, Vietnam signed an agreement with the Philippines guaranteeing shipment of up to 1.5 million tonnes of rice after Arroyo contacted Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung for a supply commitment.
Hanoi, however, has said it could only supply up to 1 million tonnes at market prices this year. The Philippines has already contracted 1.7 million tonnes of rice from overseas sources, mainly Vietnam and Thailand, at a total cost of about $1 billion so far this year to fill a gap in local output.
But authorities planned imports of up to around 2.1 million tonnes this year to shore up the country's buffer stock at an increasingly high cost.
The United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organisation forecast on Thursday that rice would remain in short supply on global markets, and poor countries that rely on food imports could see food bills rising 40 percent this year after a similar rise in 2007.