It'll take over 5 years to clear stockpiles: Thai rice exporter

[Nickymaster]

The procedure right now is too big and complicated to handle, she said. Even a special unit could not thoroughly inspect over 1,000 rice mills involved in the project.

That's exactly why Thaksin has initiated this scam. Corruption 101, make sure it's large enough in order to create a situation that becomes uncontrollable.

[PETERTHEEATER]

Looks like it's time to become the hub of rice wine vinegar!

[MobileContent]

Thai rice mountain... same same EU butter mountain.

When Farang subsidies and stock pile, it is call food security.

When Thais subsidies and stock pile, it is call a waste of middle class tax payer money.

Brilliant effort to cloud the subject, This is making Thailand near bankrupt, the rice is rotting and will rot more if nothing much is being done. Wheat -butter-normally are kept in favourable condition, YOUR lot are that stupid they are letting it rot. Vote catcher-short term only, and that is now past it's sell by date. (two meanings there)

Not middle class only but the poor people are not getting health /School/ infrastructure badly needed because of it.

Why would Thai rice been rotten after a year or two. My FIL keeps rice at times for up to 2 years in just a wooden house without bags.

Infrastructure in the North and Northeast is getting better by the day/month/year.

Health is very much free under the PTP government.

BTW: Some poor villagers that do not have rice are getting a few packs rice on 12 months credit. OK this is a questionable subject but for the next 3 months they have food at least.

I have not seen anything bad about this whole rice pledging scheme from the government. May be its bad for the middle class that have to cough up a lot of the taxes but I didn't see any big increases in taxes for a long time.

[khunken]

Thai rice mountain... same same EU butter mountain.

When Farang subsidies and stock pile, it is call food security.

When Thais subsidies and stock pile, it is call a waste of middle class tax payer money.

Brilliant effort to cloud the subject, This is making Thailand near bankrupt, the rice is rotting and will rot more if nothing much is being done. Wheat -butter-normally are kept in favourable condition, YOUR lot are that stupid they are letting it rot. Vote catcher-short term only, and that is now past it's sell by date. (two meanings there)

Not middle class only but the poor people are not getting health /School/ infrastructure badly needed because of it.

Why would Thai rice been rotten after a year or two. My FIL keeps rice at times for up to 2 years in just a wooden house without bags.

Infrastructure in the North and Northeast is getting better by the day/month/year.

Health is very much free under the PTP government.

BTW: Some poor villagers that do not have rice are getting a few packs rice on 12 months credit. OK this is a questionable subject but for the next 3 months they have food at least.

I have not seen anything bad about this whole rice pledging scheme from the government. May be its bad for the middle class that have to cough up a lot of the taxes but I didn't see any big increases in taxes for a long time.

Rose tinted glass rubbish.

First, I'll bet you FIL's family have to sieve & remove the weevils from the rice unless he is storing un-milled rice.

Infrastructure is meaningless (if it's true) when people are getting further into debt.

Health was free under the previous Government too.

Villagers who grow rice for their own consumption get nothing from the scam.

The sceme has been a disaster for the country with them finding it next to impossible to sell rice abroad except for the odd secret GtoG 'deal'. Beer and alcohol taxes have been increased not long ago (hitting the poor mostly) and inflation has gone through the roof for many foodstuffs - I'm talking about local market (Talat) food where I buy my supplies.

The unfortunate result is that they can't (or won't) stop the scheme because of vote losses and they have no plan or idea what to do with the ever mounting rice mountain.

[SOTIRIOS]

....basically the same way they handled everything....and to the tune of hundreds of billions, if not trillions, of baht......

[rubl]

Brilliant effort to cloud the subject, This is making Thailand near bankrupt, the rice is rotting and will rot more if nothing much is being done. Wheat -butter-normally are kept in favourable condition, YOUR lot are that stupid they are letting it rot. Vote catcher-short term only, and that is now past it's sell by date. (two meanings there)

Not middle class only but the poor people are not getting health /School/ infrastructure badly needed because of it.

Why would Thai rice been rotten after a year or two. My FIL keeps rice at times for up to 2 years in just a wooden house without bags.

Infrastructure in the North and Northeast is getting better by the day/month/year.

Health is very much free under the PTP government.

BTW: Some poor villagers that do not have rice are getting a few packs rice on 12 months credit. OK this is a questionable subject but for the next 3 months they have food at least.

I have not seen anything bad about this whole rice pledging scheme from the government. May be its bad for the middle class that have to cough up a lot of the taxes but I didn't see any big increases in taxes for a long time.

Health free ? The Pheu Thai led government re-introduced the 30 Baht which costs 70 - 80 to collect & administer. Heath Service hasn't improved as it was suggested. Health budgets are also not increasing with 400++ billion Baht just thrown away of rice price pledging.

A few packs of rice on credit? this government has a stockpile which deteriorates and some even discuss burning the rotten evidence. Give it to poor villagers I'd say.

If you have not seen anything bad about this whole rice price pledging scheme from the government you obviously don't read what you don't want to know.

[Puschl]

I'd like to see all of this pledged rice in one big pile. Would be the tallest mountain in Thailand I think....

I don't want to be drawn into politics, but I like number games, so let's see:

Dropped rice forms a cone, its volume being radius squared times pi times height, divided by 3

V = r^2*pi*h/3

The angle of repose for rice is alpha ~ 34° [1]. Let's use 32° and 36° as lower and upper estimates. For h=1m and using h/r = tan(alpha) this yields a radius between 1.37m (at 36°) and 1.60m (at 32°), and a volume between

V1 = 1.96 m^3 and

V2 = 2.68 m^3

So, a 1 meter mountain (err, heap) is about 2 to 2 2/3 cubic meters. The specific mass of rice depends on many factors (moisture, type, milled or not, ...). A very basic search [2] brought up values from 0.58 to 0.75 tons per cubic meter (I'm a metric guy, and when I say ton, it means 1000 kilogram). So our one meter mountain has a mass between

m1,0 = 0.55 t and

m2,0 = 2.01 t

Presently, the highest mountain of Thailand is Doi Inthanon with a prominence of 1850 meter and an elevation of 2565 meter [3]. Let's use those values as fair lower and upper bounds. Putting the rice on top of Koi Mae Pan would be cheating, wouldn't it? The mass of a mountain increases with the third power of its height, so with m = h^3*m0, our new highest mountains would have a mass between

m1 = 3 480 Mt and

m2 = 33 920 Mt

Using megatons as a unit of mass on an explosive subject is a bit questionable, but the symbol Mt on the other hand seem quite fit for rice mountains. Rice production currently is in the range of 30 to 40 Mt/a (megatons per year), depending on whether one looks on milled or fresh crop [4], up from about 10 Mt/a in the sixties [5]. So at the present production rate, the time it takes to exceed Doi Inthanon with a rice mountain is between

t1 = 87a and

t2 = 1 130a

Ninety to thousand years is quite a while, but it can be sped up through bigger rice paddies and more efficient crops. But now that I've given the Thaksinistas some ammunition, I'd like to know reliable estimates for the present government stockpiles. The rice mountain is probably 2 to 5 times as high as the Sheraton Chiang Mai, which is impressive enough. Bear in mind that it will be several hundreds of meters in diameter.

[1] http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Angle_of_repose_of_rice_grain#slide2

[2] http://www.reade.com/Particle_Briefings/spec_gra2.html

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doi_Inthanon

[4] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-12-17/rice-production-in-thailand-poised-to-reach-record-in-2012-2013.html

[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Thailand_Paddy_Rice_Production.png

[tominbkk]

Bravo sir, bravo!

[monkeycountry]

Thai rice mountain... same same EU butter mountain.

When Farang subsidies and stock pile, it is call food security.

When Thais subsidies and stock pile, it is call a waste of middle class tax payer money.

Brilliant effort to cloud the subject, This is making Thailand near bankrupt, the rice is rotting and will rot more if nothing much is being done. Wheat -butter-normally are kept in favourable condition, YOUR lot are that stupid they are letting it rot. Vote catcher-short term only, and that is now past it's sell by date. (two meanings there)

Not middle class only but the poor people are not getting health /School/ infrastructure badly needed because of it.

Why would Thai rice been rotten after a year or two. My FIL keeps rice at times for up to 2 years in just a wooden house without bags.

Infrastructure in the North and Northeast is getting better by the day/month/year.

Health is very much free under the PTP government.

BTW: Some poor villagers that do not have rice are getting a few packs rice on 12 months credit. OK this is a questionable subject but for the next 3 months they have food at least.

I have not seen anything bad about this whole rice pledging scheme from the government. May be its bad for the middle class that have to cough up a lot of the taxes but I didn't see any big increases in taxes for a long time.

You are an excellent example of why most farmers and other uneducated people see no problem with this scam.

The same thing happens if you get a credit card. Everything is fine in the beginning, you have alot of money and no worries.

However eventually the credit stops when the card is maxed out. This already happened which is why the farmers see delayed payments. Then later the bank starts calling for their money, but you have no money to give them, and then they take your house.

Thailands debt is manageable for now, but it is growing fast due to these populist policies. Eventually it will be as high as Greece and other countries, and then all government benefits such as rice scam, free healthcare, free education etc. will come to a halt. Now who do you think this will hurt the most - the poor or the bangkok elite? See for yourself who got hurt in Greece, was it the rich or the poor?

The farmers are slowly digging their own and their childrens graves, they just don't know it yet, as their lack of education prevents them from understanding macro economics.

On top of all of this comes the losses due to corruption, but that is actually a secondary issue compared to the main losses of the populist policies.

[Puschl]

If there's 16 million tons as some suggest...then it's ~430..50K ton shiploads....or 400,000 semi trailer trucks.....

Better still 800 trillion grains approximately.

http://www.funtrivia.com/askft/Question85077.html

Or, if each grain were an average 6mm long, then placed end to end would be a string of rice approx 4.8 billion KM long.

Or they would stretch around the world 119,775,421,085.46 times. (almost 120 billion)

Or they would stretch from earth to the moon and back 6,243.44 times.

That is how bad this problem is.... It is positively intergalactic.

I don't want to spoil the party, but 4.8 billion km divided by 40 000 km (ap. equator circumference) is only 120 000. And 0.032 astronomical units (average earth-sun distance) is hardly intergalactic.

But let's look at it differently: 16Mt is about 4 times the mass of the entire Thai population. So for every 60kg-dude, there's about 240kg (500lbs) of rice rotting somewhere.

[edwinchester]

Here's the inside of a friend of wifeys rice storage mill. It is open to the elements, there are vehicles in various states of assembly in there, allsorts of wildlife including a large number of family dogs, the rice pile is full of dirt, plastic sack pieces and vegetation. It is absolutely typical of storage facilities in Thailand.

[MJP]

Ferment the excess rice stocks into energy. It's the only way to get rid of this problem and come out the other end with some sort of economic benefit.

The destabilizing effects of a five year glut of rice could in fact destroy rice farming in this country for a decade or more and result in the most terrible poverty. You can't turn these industries on and off like a tap, there needs to be cash flow and consistency.

Dumping lots of money into an already overheating economy in a debt bubble will also achieve nothing but inflation and increase the risk of a hyperinflation.

"Hello, we're from the government and we're here to help." If you ever hear this . . . run!

[ratcatcher]

Here's the inside of a friend of wifeys rice storage mill. It is open to the elements, there are vehicles in various states of assembly in there, allsorts of wildlife including a large number of family dogs, the rice pile is full of dirt, plastic sack pieces and vegetation. It is absolutely typical of storage facilities in Thailand.

I can see the sand pile, where do they keep the cement and gravel?

Edited January 1, 2014 by ratcatcher

[MJP]

So you give the little guy a bit of his own money back and at the same time destroy his future income, busting him out and now you're able to offer to buy his land up on the cheap to get him out of starvation whilst creating mega farms on which you now employ the previous owners on the cheap.

[ratcatcher]

So you give the little guy a bit of his own money back and at the same time destroy his future income, busting him out and now you're able to offer to buy his land up on the cheap to get him out of starvation whilst creating mega farms on which you now employ the previous owners on the cheap.

Surely you don't think that is the PTP master plan, do you?

[MJP]

So you give the little guy a bit of his own money back and at the same time destroy his future income, busting him out and now you're able to offer to buy his land up on the cheap to get him out of starvation whilst creating mega farms on which you now employ the previous owners on the cheap.

Surely you don't think that is the PTP master plan, do you?

It's a possibility. A distinct possibility.

[Soi Sauce]

So you give the little guy a bit of his own money back and at the same time destroy his future income, busting him out and now you're able to offer to buy his land up on the cheap to get him out of starvation whilst creating mega farms on which you now employ the previous owners on the cheap.

Surely you don't think that is the PTP master plan, do you?

I've been saying the same since TPT got elected.

Check my posts since this mob got elected. Ain't hard to work out.

Get the people in debt, take their land to repay it, collapse the baht, and buy up the country for nothing.

Anyone got an alternitive on wot PTP have beeen doing since they assumed, sic, power?

Edited January 1, 2014 by Soi Sauce

[MJP]

So you give the little guy a bit of his own money back and at the same time destroy his future income, busting him out and now you're able to offer to buy his land up on the cheap to get him out of starvation whilst creating mega farms on which you now employ the previous owners on the cheap.

Surely you don't think that is the PTP master plan, do you?

I've been saying the same since TPT got elected.

Check my posts since this mob got elected. Ain't hard to work out.

Get the people in debt, take their land to repay it, collapse the baht, and buy up the country for nothing.

Anyone got an alternitive on wot PTP have beeen doing since they assumed, sic, power?

The red/yellow thing is so obviously a divide and rule tactic designed to disenfranchise anyone and everyone outside the elite. It's an illusion. The elite saw the poor growing (and other things) their way out of poverty and the middle class growing too and this was a threat to the status-quo. They accelerated the thing after the Arab Spring erupted.

Farmers offered crazy sums for rice. Where's the money coming from?

Farmers don't get paid.

Rice glut and price crash, farmers won't have future income.

Small and even medium size farmers bust and now actually starving.

Sor Nor Sam, Sor Nor Sam Gor and Chanote's now up for grabs real cheap, land is power and this consolidates it.

Middle classes hit with massive tax rises to whack them back down, all in the name of paying for the dirty farmer, set one against the other.

Remember, these people play the long game. They can afford to.

Edited January 1, 2014 by MJP

[jackrich]

Simple solution: Make rice whisky and sell it.

The whole stockpile will be gone in less than a month.

[MJP]

Simple solution: Make rice whisky and sell it.

The whole stockpile will be gone in less than a month.

Biodiesel and gas (if that's possible with rice, dunno) and take the pressure off the natural resources in the Gulf of Thailand for a bit.

But I don't think that's what all this is about.

[JRSoul]

Simple solution: Make rice whisky and sell it.

The whole stockpile will be gone in less than a month.

Yes there are literally thousands of distilleries sitting idle waiting for the government to release over-priced rice. And literally billions of customers with money burning holes in their pockets suffering from withdrawal symptoms as they wait for cheap expensive and nasty rice whisky to come on the market. They will mob rush the delivery trucks, trillions of baht will flow into government coffers and be stolen before farmers get paid.