STATEMENT BY THE HONOURABLE T. D. SORBY IN
LEGISLATIVE COUNCIL ON 1ST FEBRUARY, 1967
52169-20K-3/67
Sir,
By command of Your Excellency, I rise to lay upon the table an in- formation paper on the Hong Kong rice trade, copies of which are already in the hands of honourable Members.
On 24th March last year, during the course of the Budget debate, my honourable Colleague, Mr. HOLMES, presented a paper recording some basic facts about the rice trade in Hong Kong as a background to remarks he then had to make. I have had prepared a similar paper which reiterates in condensed form much of the earlier information, and at the same time brings the facts up to date. It also provides considerably more information on rice price movements during the years 1962 to 1966.
I do not wish to cover again the ground which my Colleague went over last year, that is to say the historical aspects of the rice control scheme, obligations of rice importers, and so on. This is all set down in the new paper. Instead I propose to start where he left off. And I shall begin by referring to the principal object of the scheme, that is to say, maintenance of stocks to tide over temporary interruptions of supply.
Rice Supplies
Mr. HOLMES said last March that the position of supplies was one of some uncertainty. By the middle of the summer that uncertainty had become a probability that there would be a regional shortage in East and South East Asia. Stocks were therefore built up, so that when the shortage became so much a reality that Thailand, the principal supplier to South East Asia, and our principal supplier over the last twenty years, banned the export of rice on 3rd November in order to try and bring down prices in its own domestic market, we had in Hong Kong sufficient stock to tide us over until supply was resumed. In other words, the primary objective of the rice control scheme was attained in circumstances when it was tested more severely than it had ever been hitherto.
Some other countries in the area viewed the situation last November with dismay, and not without reason. We, on the other hand, had built
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