Japan, responding to appeals for rice after soaring prices led to shortages, plans to

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export 200,000 tonnes to the Philippines. Japan will ship the rice “as fast as possible,” vice agriculture minister Toshirou Shirasu said.

Philippines, the world’s largest rice importer, was unable to buy enough at tender because of surging costs.

China, Egypt, India and Vietnam have curbed exports this year to safeguard domestic stockpiles and cool inflation.

The staple for half the world reached a record last month and the advance in prices for food including rice and wheat has caused riots from Haiti to Egypt. Rice traded at $20.21 per £100 in Chicago on Monday, about 20 per cent below its April 24 high.

The Japanese move can “soften the market price for rice,” said Nobuyuki Chino, president of Tokyo-based grain trading company Unipac Grain Ltd. The exports will probably push down prices in the Philippines and Indonesia, he said. Japan will export rice imported under World Trade Organisation rules.

The US won’t object if Japan taps its stockpile to ease rising prices, a US trade official said last week, ruling out the possibility of a WTO complaint.

The country has foreign rice stockpiles of about 1.2 million tonnes, a government official said on May 9.

The Philippines is also in talks with a private organisation to buy as much as 50,000 tonnes of domestic Japanese rice, Shirasu said.

US and Japanese officials will discuss this week how Japan would use the inventories, whether donated as food aid or sold on the market, the US trade official said last week.

Japan agreed to give so-called minimum market access to rice-exporting countries at the Uruguay Round of world trade talks that ended in December 1993 and bought a total of 8.32 million tonnes of foreign rice from April 1995 to October 2007.

Bloomberg