Boonsong botches chance to defend rice scheme

Boonsong botches chance to defend rice scheme

Commerce Minister Boonsong Teriyapirom's press conference last Friday which was supposed to enlighten us as to the actual status of the rice pledging scheme was a farce, a letdown as always as far as the populist scheme is concerned.

The embattled minister was not alone at the press conference which was packed with members of the Thai and foreign media eager to find out what new information he had to tell them which would defy Moody's Investment Service's earlier report of massive losses from the rice scheme, or any hard evidence he could produce to back up the claim that everything about the scheme was just fine.

By his side were Deputy Commerce Minister Natthawut Saikua, Deputy Finance Minister Thanusak Lek-uthai, and Bank of Agriculture and Agricultural Co-operatives assistant manager Supat Iamchai, plus the chairman of the Public Warehouse Organisation and the directors-general of the Foreign Trade and Internal Trade departments.

It appeared these people were there just to keep Mr Boonsong company so he would feel a bit more comfortable and would not be alone in the middle of a horde of news hounds ever ready to pounce on him with aggressive and probing questions.

None of them were helpful in shedding light on the big question that the media and taxpayers in general would like to know: How much in losses the scheme has incurred since its implementation in 2011.

Mr Boonsong himself talked about the merits of the scheme and some aspects of it that most reporters were not keen on listening to.

He said the government had already spent 600 billion baht to buy 39.5-40 million tonnes of paddy from farmers for the 2011-2012 and 2012-2013 crop years and had sold an estimated 120 billion baht worth of milled rice.

He couldn't give the figures for the amount of rice sold and did not produce any credible evidence to substantiate the rice sales, the selling prices or the names of the buyers.

Mr Boonsong maintained the losses so far were not up to 260 billion baht as reported in the press but couldn't give the real figures either, claiming that officials were still in the process of counting the losses.

"Probably, we have to wait until the next generation ...," wrote a cynical former finance minister Thirachai Phuvanatnaranubala on his Facebook page in reference to the Commerce Ministry's failure to come up with figures of losses or estimated losses from the populist scheme.

Mr Thirachai said it was shameful for the Commerce Ministry, responsible for overseeing the conduct of accountants, not to follow accountancy rules. "What if all business corporations follow in the footsteps of the Commerce Ministry?" he asked.

Suppose the losses amounted to 200 billion baht. Mr Thirachai estimated that each of the five million taxpayers in this country who are mainly fixed salary earners would have to shoulder 40,000 baht of the bill.

With the Commerce Ministry so incompetent that it cannot even give an estimation of the losses from the scheme, I wonder how the Fiscal Policy Office, which was assigned to rebut Moody's report, will be able to challenge it and, probably, to save Thailand from the grim prospect of getting a credit rating downgrade in the future if the scheme proceeds without radical modification to trim the massive outgoings.

The farcical press conference has rendered Commerce Minister Boonsong completely unreliable, while the scheme itself stinks.

Although a protege of Yaowapa Wongsawat, the new Chiang Mai MP and elder sister of Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra, he is indeed a big liability for the government.

The rice pledging scheme is now likened to a stinking dead elephant which can no longer be covered up with "lotus leaves". Mr Boonsong has been trying desperately to defy the popular Thai saying.

As a matter of fact, Mr Boonsong's credibility was badly bruised last November when the Commerce Ministry made a false claim that it had clinched a government-to-government deal to sell 15 million tonnes of rice to China over three years at five million tonnes annually under a memorandum of understanding (MOU) signed between Mr Boonsong and his Chinese counterpart Chen Deming, and witnessed by visiting Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao.

The MOU does not mention anything which indicates that China will definitely buy rice from Thailand. The closest thing to it that is mentioned in the MOU is that both China and Thailand will support their respective government and private sectors to push for bilateral rice trade and to secure rice markets.

The 15-million-tonnes rice deal was just a pure fantasy of a day-dreaming commerce minister!

As the situation stands, the failed rice pledging scheme is looking more and more like a time bomb that will shake the government to its very foundations, and even makes kid's stuff of Deputy Prime Minister Chalerm Yubamrung's anti-government conspiracy theory.


Veera Prateepchaikul is a former editor, Bangkok Post.

Veera Prateepchaikul

Former Editor

Former Bangkok Post Editor, political commentator and a regular columnist at Post Publishing.

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