The government has decided to chip in with the aid, although the fine print of the same is not available as yet, after cartelisation efforts in concert with Indonesia and Malaysia failed to arrest price drop in natural rubber aggravating farmers’ poor plight.
BANGKOK (Commodity Online): Rubber farmers in Thailand—world’s largest producer of natural rubber– are about to get close to $1 billion or 30 billion baht in aid from Thai government.
Reports appeared in the media suggest that, of the amount, 10 billion baht would go to cut production costs, 15 billion to help major processors of natural rubber with new machineries and some 5 billion baht to help farmer cooperatives set up more rubber producing plants.
The government has decided to chip in with the aid, although the fine print of the same is not available as yet, after cartelisation efforts in concert with Indonesia and Malaysia failed to arrest price drop in natural rubber aggravating farmers’ poor plight.
Farmers, though they have welcomed the funding, is in no mood to ease the pressure valves as they want the government to implement what has been promised and is continuing with protests.
The Thai government was also found funding rice farmers in a similar way.
“Now that rice farmers and rubber farmers get subsidies from the government, farmers of other crops will want to have their share,” said Aat Pisanwanich, director of the Center for International Trade Studies at Thai Chamber of Commerce University to The Wall Street Journal.
“The government has to come up with longer-term measures because this subsidy isn’t sustainable,” he noted.
It is a tight rope that the Thai government is walking, providing subsidies on one end and curbing expenditures on the other.
The country currently sits on a stockpile of 200,000 tons of idle natural rubber inventories.
Source: Commodity Online
