http://quote.bloomberg.com, Thailand will talk with the Swedish government about the possibility of exchanging raw chicken meat for fighter aircraft to help Thai exporters reduce their inventories, Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra said.
“There is a large inventory of raw chicken meat in the warehouse that we need to offload,'' Thaksin said in a taped interview with state-owned Channel 9. “My government will do whatever to help chicken farmers sell their chicken meat.''
Thai chicken exports this year may fall 60 percent to 200,000 tons, the lowest since 1996, after Japan, European Union members and other countries banned chicken meat imports from the Southeast Asian country following a bird flu outbreak.
Thaksin yesterday left Thailand for his five-day official visit to Italy and Sweden.
Sweden is the second country with which Thailand wants to exchange chicken for aircraft. Thailand is in talks with the Russian government to reach such an agreement, Thaksin said on Aug. 31.
The European Union, including Sweden, extended until next March a ban on the import of raw poultry, eggs and live birds from Thailand and nine other Asian countries because of the spread of the avian flu virus, the Brussels-based European Commission said on Sept. 15. The EU allows only imports of cooked and processed chicken meat.
Thai exporters have about 60,000 tons of frozen chicken meat in storage that they are unable to sell because of the ban, according to commerce ministry data published Aug. 19. Thailand is the world's fifth-largest chicken meat exporter.
