The Commerce Ministry plans proactive measures to prevent cassava prices from falling sharply during this month's harvest season, when millions of tonnes are expected to flood the market.
Commerce Minister Apiradi Tantraporn said most of the new measures are aimed at creating networks that bring growers together with industrial end-users.
"We're focused on bridging the gap between growers and users so that we have certain demand to meet rising supply during the harvesting season," Ms Apiradi said.
The problem of falling cassava price is likely to be less serious than usual this year, with Thailand, the world's biggest exporter of tapioca products, forecast to have a smaller cassava crop.
The ministry expects output of 28.5 million tonnes of tapioca production from 30 million tonnes of cassava in the current 2017-18 crop, which would be 7.6% smaller than the previous crop.
Ms Apiradi said the Commerce Ministry has encouraged tapioca makers to forge long-term purchasing agreements with ethanol producers. The two sectors already have a memorandum of understanding for ethanol firms to secure a certain amount of raw material from growers.
The ministry has also set up a network of cassava growers, tapioca producers and feedstuff makers to create mutually supportive supply chains.
Spanning 15 provinces in the Northeast, the network has created fixed demand for more than 250,000 tonnes of cassava.
The government plans to set aside an additional budget to finance local enterprises that will process cassava into alternative food products and attain higher value than selling commodity-grade cassava to tapioca producers and modified starch makers.
The selling price of cassava, from farmers to factories, is two baht a kilogramme, unchanged from a year earlier.
Thailand exported 10.6 million tonnes of tapioca products in 2016, down from 11.3 million tonnes in 2015.
