Patience can lead to virtue and rotten rice

Taxpayers should not be surprised if they are occasionally confused by the conflicting statements made by Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra and her ministers, Commerce Minister Boonsong Teriyapirom in particular, pertaining to anything related to the rice pledging scheme because the government is treating everything as a trade secret which must be kept confidential and disclosed to the public only at the end of next year.

Thus, taxpayers' questions about whether the export deals amounting to 8 million tonnes of milled rice to China, Bangladesh, Indonesia and the Ivory Coast, as claimed by the Commerce Ministry, are in the form of non-binding memorandums of understanding (MoUs) or binding contractual agreements, or about the exact amount of rice sold to each of the four buyers and at what prices will have to wait.