Don Mueang rice plan dropped

“The government is seeking other warehouses to stock new crops. So far, warehouses should be adequate for keeping rice, while the government will gradually release [old] rice from its stockpiles,” Commerce Minister Boonsong Teriyapirom said yesterday.
Traffic and safety problems as well as steep maintenance costs have ruled out Don Mueang as an option, he said.
Somsak Vongvattanasant, vice president of the Public Warehouse Organisation (PWO), said the agency was campaigning for more silos to join the government’s pledging project. More space is available now for up to 300,000 tonnes.
The government should have more free space for up to 3 million or 4 million tonnes of rice by year-end, he said.
The government with cooperation from the private sector will mobilise the capacity to store up to 20 million tonnes. This excludes high-quality rice silos, which should be able to keep at least 2 million tonnes.
However, silos are much more expensive than normal warehouses. The stocking cost for a warehouse is Bt20 per tonne a month, while the cost for a silo is Bt80.
The PWO reported that about 108,000 tonnes of pledged rice from the harvest starting at the beginning of this month was now entering the government’s warehouses.
Four cases of government officials committing acts of corruption under the rice-pledging project have been uncovered, but police yesterday reaffirmed that they could handle such fraud cases.
However, Woraphong Shiew-preecha, deputy commissioner of Provincial Police Region 9 and the secretary-general of a committee inspecting the rice pledging project, said the committee did not need to conduct its investigation stringently, as it was quite effective now.
More police have been sent to observe rice pledging at each processing centre. About five officers will be stationed at each pledging point, along with four representatives from the PWO.
From August 9 to October 12, 27 cases of pledging graft were reportedly found, involving 762 farmers and 60 other offenders. Those cases generated a loss of Bt313 million for the rice-pledging project. In four cases, government officials were involved.
The committee will carefully check the number of registered farmers after finding a discrepancy, Wora-phong said. About 4.2 million farmers have registered under the pledging project, while the Agri-culture Department reported only 3.9 million farmers.