Rice damage charge filed
THE RICE POLICY and Management Committee has filed a criminal complaint against those alleged to have damaged rice in government stockpiles.
Commerce Ministry permanent secretary Chutima Bunyaprapha-sara, Foreign Trade Department director-general Duangporn Rodphaya and representatives from the Public Warehouse Organisation yesterday filed the complaint with the Crime Suppression Division of the Royal Thai Police.
They alleged that more than 100 defendants caused losses to the |government and should be |subject to criminal and civil penalties.
On December 19, the Rice Policy and Management Committee agreed to assign the Commerce Ministry’s permanent secretary to file the case with the police in order to punish participants in the previous elected government’s rice-pledging programme for irresponsible storage of rice stocks.
According to the allegation, about 3.6 million tonnes of rice in about 700 warehouses either disappeared, was damaged, or deteriorated in quality, causing huge losses for the government.
Low storage standards
An inspection of the total of 17 million tonnes in the stockpiles allegedly found only 12.2 per cent or about 2.1 million tonnes of the rice was of good quality, while the rest had deteriorated because of low storage standards.
About 5 per cent of the rice was destroyed.
Previously, the Thailand Development Research Institute estimated that the pledging programme had cost the country Bt660 billion.
It further alleged that about one-sixth of that cost, or Bt123 billion, went to politicians involved in the rice-subsidy project.
Based on the government’s ability to release rice from the stockpiles over the next 10 years, the country could face a cost of up to Bt960 billion for warehousing and operational expenses, the institute claims.
The government spent up to Bt985 billion buying 54.4 million tonnes of paddy over two and a half years under the pledging programme but most of the Bt560-billion producer surplus went to medium-to-large-scale farmers, the TDRI claims.
More important, it said the “welfare cost” of the policy exceeded the producer and consumer surplus by Bt120 billion.
