BANGKOK, March 29 – Thailand and Bangladesh signed an agreement to extend the timeframe of the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) on their rice trade for another three years to 2016, said Commerce Minister Boonsong Teriyapirom.
The MoU between the Thai and Bangladeshi governments was earlier set to end now, in March 2013.
The minister said the framework of the agreement is to trade parboiled rice at a maximum amount of one million tonnes annually, depending on the rice production situation of each side and the global market price.
In 2011, the Thai Ministry of Commerce entered a government-to-government contract with Bangladesh to trade 200,000 tonnes of parboiled rice.
In 2012, Bangladesh did not import rice from Thailand as the country had no a natural disaster.
Bangladesh has a population of more than 160 million and the demand for rice is about 35 million tonnes annually and it imports about 178,000 tonnes of rice from Thailand each year on average.
