Cooperative Promotion Department draws up plans to help rice farmers
Phichead Wiriyaphaha, director-general of Cooperative Promotion Department, has announced that his department is readying agricultural cooperatives nationwide to join the government’s unmilled rice scheme to help rice farmers after several private millers and agricultural cooperatives were forced to shut their rice buying stations due to a lack of revolving funds.
“After discussing with other partners in the scheme including the Department of Internal Trade, the Bank for Agriculture and Agricultural Cooperatives (BAAC) and the Public Warehouse Organisation, we came up with three measures to help rice farmers and regulate the price of unmilled rice,” said Phechead.
“The first measure is to stock unmilled rice in silos of farmers or partner organisations and pay a storage fee of Bt1,000-Bt1,500 per tonne to slow the release of rice on the market and prevent oversupply,” he said. “The second measure is to provide loans to farmers to enable them to process their rice into different value-added products. The total budget for this measure is set at Bt15 billion while the interest will be set at the MLR-1 of 4 per cent per year, with the government responsible for 3 per cent and farmers paying 1 per cent interest.”
For the last measure, the Cooperative Promotion Department will join the government in paying rice traders an additional 3 per cent in storage fees if they buy and store more unmilled rice in their stock for another 2-6 months. The total budget for this measure is set at Bt510 million and target of stocked rice is at 4 million tonnes.
“We will present the 3 measures to the Cabinet for approval on December 3,” said Phichead.