DHAKA, April 17: Bangladesh started its rice harvest on Thursday with hopes of a bumper crop, but a farmland crunch in China and the Philippines underlines trouble ahead in dealing with the global food crisis.

Rice prices in impoverished Bangladesh, which have doubled in the past 12 months, have started falling as hoarders sell stocks before new supplies come on the market, officials said.

“With the bumper ‘Boro’ harvest that’s expected and the sufficiency in strategic stocks, there’s unlikely to be a (food) crisis in this country,” said Bangladesh Foreign Minister Iftekhar Ahmed Chowdhury. But Chowdhury renewed an appeal for a global strategy to tackle spiralling worldwide commodity prices, saying the United Nations was perhaps best suited to handle it.

Bangladesh Food Secretary Mollah Wahiduzzaman noted that prices had already fallen by 60-70 taka (one dollar) per 40 kg in the expectation of the new crop from the Boro, or cool-dry, harvest.

“We hope a bumper harvest will cool down the market for months,” he added.

This Boro season, “we expect the total yield to be over 18 million tonnes — or two-thirds of our total annual rice output,” said farm official Shahidul Islam.—AFP