From Bloomberg, the Wall Street Journal and China Daily via Breitbart:
United Nations agricultural experts are reporting confusion, after figures show that China imported 2.6 million tons of rice in 2012, substantially more than a four-fold increase over the 575,000 tons imported in 2011. The confusion stems from the fact that there is no obvious reason for vastly increased imports, since there has been no rice shortage in China. The speculation is that Chinese importers are taking advantage of low international prices, but all that means is that China's own vast supplies of domestically grown rice are being stockpiled. Why would China suddenly be stockpiling millions of tons of rice for no apparent reason? Perhaps it's related to China's aggressive military buildup and war preparations in the Pacific and in central Asia.The Bloomberg story in particular plays the "cheaper than international" angle without really going into the stockpiling question:
Heaven knows that I'm not a paranoid person, but it was just three days ago that I reported that Australians are running short of powdered milk formula because Chinese tourists are visiting Australia, buying large quantities of the formula in bulk, and taking it back to China. There's no apparent reason for that, either. China Daily and Bloomberg and Wall Street Journal
Rice Imports by China Set to Jump Fourfold on Local Prices
...“The year 2012 marks a radical departure from China’s normal pattern of purchases,” Calpe wrote in an e-mail to Hiroyuki Konuma, the FAO’s assistant secretary general and regional representative for Asia and Pacific. “Nobody knows the actual volume of rice held in stocks by China,” according to the e-mail, which was forwarded to Bloomberg yesterday....If there is a connection between this story and "Cotton Market: Louis Dreyfus Says China is Manipulating the Market" one could start drawing some potentially dire conclusions.
