200,000 tons of rice missing

200,000 tons of rice missing

countervalue.com

An estimated 200,000 tons of rice, worth 100 million dollars, has gone missing from national warehouses in Thailand this year as world prices of the commodity soared, state media reported Monday. The grain has disappeared from the government’s rice stockpile of 2.1 million tons, kept in national warehouses as a means of curbing high prices on the local market and assuring a food supply for the poor, said Bank of Thailand (BoT) senior economist Benjamas Kotenongbua.

(visit the link for the full news article)

Just more dismal news regarding the global food situation. Now people are stealing hundreds of thousands of tons of rice from their own national reserves.

This is going to get ugly.

countervalue.com
(visit the link for the full news article)

reply to post by Karlhungis


Maybe people who ride Japanese motorcycles took it...
OR China Buffet...
or wedding planners... just kid'n...

It sounds like market manipulation to me, Karl; someone wanted to make
alot of money on commodoties futures.

I think hoarding is another culprit. We'll see that more & more, as the
world's problems escalate.

It's already ugly, Karl... only to get worse. The average American is going to be in for a very rude wake up call about this, when it starts affecting our stomachs. And that's ALOT of BIG stomachs in this country, full of excessiveness and greed.

reply to post by RabbitChaser


See, I don't think America will feel this nearly as much as the rest of the world. We don't have to rely on imports for our food and while food is an important expense, it has a long ways to go before large amounts of Americans are starving to death because it is too expensive. Most of the world will turn to chaos before the US does as far as food is concerned.

Imagine how many businesses this could bankrupt though? Nobody will be going to McDonalds when you are paying 10 bucks for a cheeseburger. Restaurants will be forced to raise the prices beyond what people will want to pay. It certainly has the potential to kill the economy.

Very scary news indeed. So food is the 'new gold and diamonds' of the world? Guess I better put that electric fence up around the ole garden this year......

reply to post by Karlhungis


I stood in line at the grocery today behind a woman who had 5 children, all under 10 I would bet by their sizes. She was struggling to keep them all from picking up items to add to the cart, in her cart, she had a couple of bags of beans, a bag of potatoes, and a big pack of hamburger meat. She paid for all that with a food stamp debit card. She was grumbling that her food stamp allotment wasn't going far enough and she doesn't know what to do, her caseworker told her they may be temporarily reduced, due to some new implemetation of the program. She was also stating that she has 2 more weeks to go before she would get more. It won't take children like hers much more of this strain and they will go from eating food they hate to eating anything they can find.

reply to post by space cadet


Yes, I think that the poor people in our country will be facing a new reality. I don't think they will be facing Ethopian conditions anytime soon though. Like I was saying earlier, we are so much better off than people in 3rd world countries that people don't realize it. People in Haiti were eating mud cookies last year... They would kill for the amount of food that the woman you saw just got for free from the government.

I am not saying it is right and I am not happy about it. I just think that we, even the poor, are so well off when it comes to food that the crisis will be VERY VERY bad in the rest of the world before we feel any crisis like effects in the US.

There are probably a few explanations for this. I'm just going to go with low crop yeilds, government taking rice to experiment on the yeilds, or some kind of new super pest.

Yeah I choose super pest. After years and years of poisoning us and the Earth with unnecessary chemicals it is quite possible we have bred some sort of insect that is immune to all known, legal (but when has this stopped it), pesticides.

Originally posted by Karlhungis


See, I don't think America will feel this nearly as much as the rest of the world. We don't have to rely on imports for our food

With respect, what you do have to rely on is the distances involved between food producers and the retailers down to the public.
Oil hit $112 now and will go up. some say that food is going up because of the demand for bio fuels.

And after the example your government made after Katrina hit, I can't see any form of emergency aid being delivered very quickly to anywhere.

I heard once that a bottle of French wine was expensive in the US. Not because of taxes but because it was all transported around the country by road rather than air or rail.

You've also got to consider the loss of the bee population that America and others are experiencing. Reduced crop levels combined with high prices and high demand and all other factors are going to cause some very serious upsets.



[edit on 15-4-2008 by Extralien]

reply to post by Extralien


We do still have a fairly robust railroad system for transporting goods that don't rely on the price of oil. I would imagine that we would stop our exports to ensure our own people don't starve to death. Again, I think that the US could remain fairly isolated from this for some time. I am also speaking in relative terms though. Of course we will feel it, but we can ride it out longer than most of the world.

I am merely speaking in terms of starvation or not. If we have to implement these measures, the world is falling apart and we would have to worry about so many more things. The economy would obviously be shot, probably martial law... very dark times indeed. But I think that the US is set up to ensure that its people don't starve to death.

reply to post by youvegotbighands



and a few other explainations for this 'shortage' or 'loss' might be;

these were Thai government storage warehouses for the rice,

the phantom bulk rice may have never existed,
the tonnage of rice was likely exaggerated,
perhaps usd as a reserve
collateral to get that World Bank or IMF loan

Perhaps some Generals or Politicians are black marketing tons of rice over time and pocketing the cash,
thats just a few more possibilities...if one is as cynical thinking as i am.


000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000


doing some number crunching i calculated that

200,000 tone of rice = 40,000,000 lbs.
divided by $100,000,000. oo
(or $101.5million @ www.earthtimes.org)

still rounds out @ .39 cents per pound


[edit on 15-4-2008 by St Udio]

reply to post by space cadet


Did you tell her to get a job? Or maybe stop having kids? There's alot of people who misuse those welfare handouts. Once I stood in line behind a couple who bought $20 worth of junk food, and didn't even have kids. Neither of them were incapable of holding jobs.

And when they give the "Oh, poor me, I can't find a job" excuse, I have to laugh, since there's jobs everywhere. Matter of fact, my employer has spend hundreds on advertising, and we are lucky to get one applicant.

People need to get off their lazy behinds and look.

As far as the missing rice is concerned, if you knew that food shortages were coming, wouldn't you secure a foothold?

Oh by "government" shortages I meant that the Thai government was testing the rice to see how to increase yield.

Just a possibility