Indian monsoon failure compresses the cereal balance.
prob 0.27 · severity 3.8 / 5South Asia + African importers · rice + buffer-stock drawdown
open scenario →$ shortage commodity get RIC.WHT > spot: $13.98/cwt > stress_index: 0.49 CAUTION > updated 14:29 UTC
BRENT $88.52/b ● TTF €61.42/MWh ▲ OPEC_ORB $108.8/b ● SPR_US 304.8 Mb ▼ FAO_FFPI 130.3 ▼
Daily closing prices, 2026-02-02 → 2026-05-15 — Iran-war energy-crisis window.
Thai 5% white rice, the Asian export reference. Drifting up on thin exporter inventories.
Rice White Thai is a global staple cereal traded primarily through Thailand, Vietnam, India and Pakistan as exporters and the Philippines, Indonesia, Nigeria and Sub-Saharan Africa as importers. The CBOT rough rice futures contract prices the rough form in US dollars per hundredweight (cwt). Current spot: $13.98/cwt.
Thai 5% white rice, the Asian export reference. Drifting up on thin exporter inventories. At the latest reading, Rice White Thai prints a spot of $13.98/cwt — a move of ▲0.32% over the past twenty-four hours and ▲1.84% across the trailing thirty days.
The v3.2 stress index places RIC.WHT at 0.49 — a caution reading on a composite that blends price momentum, inventory cover, supplier concentration and geopolitical exposure. The metric is recomputed on every ingestion cycle, and the weekly delta is the line worth tracking rather than the absolute level.
For operators, the question is not the spot itself but the buffer behind it. A tightening reading on Rice White Thai compounds with any incident on a shared transit route or producer, and the cascade is rarely linear. The scenarios below carry RIC.WHT as an explicit input — each one is wargamed and reviewed against this commodity's exposure profile.