CityNews – A recent army raid has found that 91,000 sacks of rice worth about 69 million baht are missing from a warehouse in the central province of Pathum Thani. The rice was owed to the old government as part of the rice-pledging scheme.
Army troops performing the raid discovered that the company responsible for keeping the rice safe had tried to cover up the disappearance by piling other sacks of rice several metres tall in order to make a four-sided wall. From the outside, the warehouse looked full of rice, but upon investigation, a big empty space was discovered inside the stacked walls.
The raid was the result of a tip off, while rumours say that three million more tonnes of rice has “disappeared” from the country’s stockpiles. Army troops are conducting similar searches on rice stocks in warehouses nationwide, focusing on those which store rice under the old government’s rice-pledging scheme.
The loss caused by the 2-year-old rice-pledging scheme is said to be standing at 500 billion baht, which is a huge blow to the country’s economy, the farmers who suffered from the failure of the pledging program, and the people’s faith in government schemes.
Rice has been discovered missing before, with 10,000 sacks reportedly stolen last year.