Bangkok, Feb 17 - Thailand, the world's biggest rice exporter, is in talks to sell rice to Iran, East Timor and Cuba through government-to-government deals, a senior Commerce Ministry official said on Tuesday.
"We are still in talks with those countries," said Apiradi Tantraporn, director general of the Department of Foreign Trade, which oversees the country's rice trading.
"They are not easy deals and the main problem we face is how to arrange payments as the way they want to pay does not coincide with how we want to do it," she said.
She declined to give further details about how many tonnes each country wanted to buy.
However, East Timor has expressed an interest in buying 45,000 tonnes of Thai rice since last year. It failed to seal the deal due to payment problems, Apiradi said, without giving details.
Iran, one of Thailand's major buyers, also wants to buy rice through a government channel, but it faces the obstacle of how to pay the bill, due to Western financial sanctions.
"We need to be very careful about selling rice through a government deal because we don't want to face the same problem we had with North Korea," she said, referring to a case in 1993 when North Korea failed to pay $120 million for rice bought from Thailand.
RETAIN MARKET SHARES
Despite fierce competition with Vietnam, Apiradi said Thailand was confident of exporting 8.5-9.5 million tonnes of rice this year, aiming to retain a 32 percent export market share. Vietnam was the second biggest exporter with 17 percent, she said.
"This year is a tough year for rice exports, as we won't do well on white rice because of uncompetitive prices," Apiradi said.
White rice accounts for 40 percent of Thai rice exports, while 25 percent is parboiled rice, 20 percent is fragrant rice and the rest is broken rice.
Traders said Thailand was losing market share on white rice to Vietnam after the Philippines, the biggest rice buyer, bought 1.5 million tonnes this year.
"But we could shift to promote the sale of premium-grade fragrant and parboiled rice, which we are keen on doing, and that would help increase overall Thai rice exports," Apiradi said.
The Commerce Ministry planned to launch rice campaigns in Europe, America and Africa to promote sales of premium grades to offset the loss of market share in white rice, she said.
Thailand sold 10 million tonnes of rice in 2008, according to Commerce Ministry data.