Rice Cartel - For Development, Not Price Gouging

May 3, 2008 (LPAC) - The financial oligarchy is screaming bloody murder against the proposal launched by Thailand's Prime Minister Samak Sundaravej this week for an Organization of Rice Exporting Nations, or OREC. The London Times denouonced OREC as an effort to "seek to gain more control over the price of grain" - a dead give-away that their real concern is that OREC might take the control over the price of grain away from the global cartels and the commodities markets - i.e., from the British.

In fact, the motivation for OREC is not as a new OPEC to drive prices up, but an oranization aimed at driving {production} up, through cooperation and technological advances, especially among Thailand's extremely poor neighbors, Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar (Vietnam, the world's second largest rice exporter after Thailand, is also expected to join, but has not agreed as yet). This is the sense emerging from EIR discussions with officials from Thai, Cambodian and Myanmar.

The idea was raised by Thailand's PM Samak while meeting with Myanmar's PM Thein Sein this past week, with the focus being Thailand's agricultural and technological assistance in returning Myanmar to the status of a major rice exporter, as it once was. The British used Myanmar (then Burma) to feed the empire (and to produce opium with which to enslave China). Reviving Myanmar's productivity will require irrigation, transportation, access to fertilizers and high-yield seeds, and other inputs. One of the two dams planned for construction on the Salween River (one of the primary targets for sabotage by the genocidal WWF) is towards the south, near the paddy fields, and will be used for both power and irrigation. New transportation routes are under construction from Thailand, China and India - to the horror of the Brits and their dupes inthe US Congress.

In Cambodia, which produces about 6 million tons of rice above consumption, most of the exports take place across the borders, to Thailand and Vietnam, because the transportation networks don't exist to get the crop to the ports for export. The Thais and Vietnamese, in turn, consume the cheap Cambodian rice and export their own higher grades.

Laos is only now solving its landlocked status by opening the north-south road, connecting Kunming in China with Bangkok through Laos, and creating the possibility of becoming a major exporter. A major dam on a tributary of the Mekong is nearing completion, which will provide both power and irrigation.