Thais Ask Cambodia to Curb Cassava Exports

Thai cassava farmers have asked Cambodia to stop exporting the com­modity into Thailand in an at­tempt to keep prices high and avoid oversaturating the market, officials said yesterday.

Sao Sarat, Pailin provincial Cab­inet chief, said that Thai government officials representing local cassava farmers met with Pailin provincial authorities two weeks ago to re­quest that Cam­bodia drop its daily cassava exports from nearly 2,000 tons a day to no more than 370 tons a day.

“Thai farmers want to sell their cassava first,” said Mr. Sarat. “The price is dropping because our farmers have…flooded their market.”

Mr. Sarat said that the price of un­pro­cessed cassava has dropped from 2 baht (about $0.06) per kg at the end of 2011 to 1.5 baht (about $0.05) today.

As of yesterday, Cambodia was con­tinuing to export cassava at the same level, though Mr. Sarat said there would soon be another round of negotiations with Thailand on the matter.

Run Sophanara, chief of the agro­nomy office at Banteay Mean­chey province’s agriculture department, said that even though Cam­bodia sent its first shipment of cassava to China earlier this month, there are not enough buyers elsewhere to justify slowing exports to Thailand.

“Right now, we do not have enough contacts to export more to countries like China,” he said.

According to data from the Ban­teay Meanchey provincial agri­cul­­ture department, the total amount of land used to grow cassava in the pro­vince has more than doubled from 21,057 hectares at the beginning of 2011 to 42,445 hectares today.

He added that flooding late last year had damaged roughly 6,000 hec­tares of the land. Still, last year’s yield amounted to 754,493 tons compared to 404,852 tons the year before.

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