Rice farmers fret over risks from credit card scheme
Rice farmers are deeply concerned about the pitfalls in the government's credit-card scheme for them, such as higher debt, corruption and higher cost of production.
Prasith Boonchuey, president of the Thai Rice Farmers Association, said yesterday that the credit-card programme would only spoil farmers, as the government does not have any tracing system to check back on their spending.
Farmers could easily collude with agricultural-equipment vendors to inflate prices and use the extra credit to purchase other, unnecessary products, he said.
For instance, they could agree to charge Bt5,000 on the card to buy fertiliser, while the real value was only Bt4,000. Then the farmer would get money to stock up on other goods, while the shop would get higher credit from the farmer.
Farmers would be stuck with higher debts as they would overspend and finally be unable to pay their bills.
Suppliers would feel free to raise prices, since they would no longer have to worry about farmers’ purchasing power.
The association has called on the government to solve the problem of rising costs of raw materials directly rather than pass out credit cards to farmers.
The prices of chemical fertiliser have increased steadily since the start of the pledging scheme. For example, a 50-kilogram bag of urea fertiliser has jumped from Bt600 last October to Bt800.
