--FILE--employés chinois sont vus sur le stand de Sinograin Oils Corporation, une filiale de Sinograin, également connu sous le nom de réserve de céréales de la Chine Corporatio
--FILE--Chinese employees are seen at the stand of Sinograin Oils Corporation, a subsidiary of Sinograin, also known as China Grain Reserve Corporation, during an exhibition in Beijing, China, 30 October 2013. China's history of famine and starvation led it in 2004 to set up a price system that guarantees that the state would buy grains from farmers if the market falls below a preset level. The price floor encouraged farmers to produce even under expectations of weak markets. The policy has been credited with an 11-year run of bumper harvests, but it's also produced some problems. For one thing, it has sometimes resulted in a huge surplus of grains. For another, as the state-owned China Central Television charged in a televised expose last week, it has helped grow a crop of scam artists looking to illicitly profit from the annual differences in the state's minimum purchase prices, as Beijing's system is known. In a four-minute segment broadcast on CCTV's news report, video footage showed a grain merchant in China's northeastern Jilin province buying 47 metric tons of old rice from state stockpile China Grain Reserve Corp., also called Sinograin, and then reselling the shipment as newly harvested rice via a second trader to another state warehouse. The old grain was purportedly from the 2011 harvest and was bought by the merchant from Sinograin at 2.84 yuan (around $.50) per kilogram, the state support price from that year. But it was resold as 2014 grains at 3.1 yuan a kilogram, CCTV said. The single illicit transaction resulted in a profit of about 10, 000 yuan, the report said.
