Rice reserve exceeds 1.5 million tons

Korea's rice reserve exceeded 1.5 million tons in the 2010 food grain year, the highest reached since 1994, the government said Tuesday.
The Ministry for Food, Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries said last year's reserve represents a gain of 52 percent, or 516,000 tons, from the year before and is due to a surge in local production and more rice brought into the country under the minimum market access arrangement (MMA).
Seoul secured an MMA deal with leading rice exporters in late 2004 to limit market access to cheap imports.
The drop in rice consumption also contributed to the rise in the reserve, it said. In 2010 an average South Korean consumed 72.8 kilograms of rice, down from 74.0 kilograms the year before.
The total is also twice as large as a reserve of 720,000 tons that policymakers said is adequate for dealing with emergency situations.
The country produced 4.91 million tons of rice from November 2009 to October 2010, a gain of 1.5 percent from the year before, although demand fell 1.8 percent to 4.70 million tons.
South Korea's rice reserve that stood at 1.44 million tons in 2002 fell to 832,000 tons in 2005 as Seoul started to provide rice assistance to North Korea, and fell further to 695,000 tons in 2007. The stockpile, however, started to rise to reach 993,000 tons in the 2009 food grain year as assistance to the North was cut off because of cool inter-Korean relations.

(Source: http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/biz/2011/03/123_82241.html)