Data centre planned to secure farm prices

Data centre planned to secure farm prices

Chutima: New ways of dealing with rice
Chutima: New ways of dealing with rice

The Commerce Ministry plans to build a real-time commodity data centre to manage inventories, production and marketing strategy to prevent prices from falling, said Chutima Bunyapraphasara, the deputy commerce minister.

The data management centre will be distinct from data centres, jointly set up with the Agriculture Ministry, to manage plantations and agriculture zoning, she said.

"The joint data centre will need more specified information technology and will take longer time to set up. But we plan to have another data centre to help us form a clearer picture for each commodity to better deal with them," said Ms Chutima.

Initially, the data centre will collect information about production, stocks and commodity demand, she said.

The Commerce Ministry wants to start with rice and palm oil, which are major commodities that usually face price dips and oversupply problems.

Thailand faces a 500,000 tonne glut in crude palm oil. That supply is weighing on prices, forcing the Energy Ministry to try and ramp up the proportion of palm-based biodiesel sold to motorists to 7%, up from 3-5%.

Another commodity that needs to be managed is rice, said Ms Chutima.

"We need to find new ways to deal with rice as several related factors have changed significantly," she said.

For instance, domestic rice consumption is changing due to the growth in foreign tourists.

"The number of foreign visitors has risen to over 30 million. That could push us to put aside more rice for domestic consumption. But external factors could also affect our exports, pushing us to need a new data centre to analyse these changes," said Ms Chutima.

Thailand normally produces 30-33 million tonnes of paddy and 20 million tonnes of milled rice each year. Around 10 million tonnes is for domestic consumption and the rest for export.

She said the Commerce Ministry still holds 2 million tonnes of rice stocks, built up during the Yingluck government's 2011 rice buying scheme. The present stock is well below the record high of 18 million tonnes.

But Ms Chutima said the ministry had stopped releasing rice stocks for several months in order to buoy domestic prices during the harvesting period of November-January.

"We will think about releasing supply again in February," she said.

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