• 
• 

Published on April 23, 2008

Petchanet Pratruangkrai,

Sucheera Pinijpanakarn

The Nation

The Finance Ministry will review the use of millions of rai of land owned by the Treasury Department.

The move is a bid to bring the land into production as part of a broad strategy to deal with the food crisis. It follows instructions from the Cabinet, which also approved a budget of Bt10 billion to tackle the national food crisis systematically over the next 12 years.

The crisis has arisen globally, because of unprecedented rises in prices for staple food grains like wheat and rice and vital livestock feeds like corn and soybeans. Demand is outpacing supply, and the world's stocks of cereals, such as rice, are dwindling to the point where they can no longer provide an effective buffer in years of poor production.

While population growth is the fundamental cause, production and pricing problems are due partly to weather problems linked to climate change and rising oil prices boosting demand for biofuels.

The government's strategy is aimed at tackling the reduction in land areas devoted to food crops because farmers are turning to more lucrative fuel crops. It also seeks to ensure food supplies for both domestic consumption and export.

Agriculture Minister Somsak Prissanananthakul yesterday said plans included use of Treasury Department land to grow not only food crops, but also fuel crops. The country's rice growing area should increase from 57 million rai now to 60 million rai next year, lifting annual paddy-rice production to 30 million tonnes, from this year's expected harvest of 28.06 million tonnes.

However, he said farmers who leased Treasury Depart-ment land would have to pay a rent of Bt20 per rai per year.

To smooth the plan, Commerce Minister Mingkwan Sangsuwan has been made chairman of a special food-crisis committee. He has already ordered the office of the Council of State to check on the details of regulations controlling the country's 130 million rai of farmland.

The government will encourage farmers to grow more oil palm, cassava and other fuel crops. In addition, it will also focus on creation of irrigation systems, to ensure water supplies.

The Charoen Pokphand (CP) Group, the country's biggest agribusiness conglomerate, yesterday said the government needed to spend Bt200 billion to develop irrigation systems in order to ensure future farming was sustainable.

CP said other national plans would benefit from the development of irrigation systems.

Montri Congtrakultien, CEO and president of CP's crop-integration business group, said the government should use skyrocketing commodity prices to invest in irrigation development, because the cost remained low.