The head of the United Nations' food agency has backed plans for international grain reserves, offering high-ranked support for proposals relaunched this week by French President Francois Hollande.

Jose Graziano da Silva, the director-general of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, "expressed interest and support" for proposals for using strategic stockpiles of food to boost food security, the FAO said.

"For FAO, maintaining food security reserves is a very good strategy that contributes to the stability of domestic prices of food," Mr Graziano da Silva said.

He is to discuss the proposal, aired by Mr Hollande on Tuesday, on a visit next month to China, the highest-profile operator of state crop stockpiles, and indeed this week sold 400,000 tonnes of soybeans from inventories at 4,552 yuan ($720) per tonne.

The price, while equivalent to more than $19 a bushel, represents a discount of some 350 yuan a tonne to futures on the Dalian exchange, besides being cheaper than imports to private buyers, who face paying VAT.

Support and opposition

Mr da Silva's support was revealed at a meeting in Rome, where the FAO is based, with Norberto Yauhar, the agriculture minister of Argentina, which also maintains reserves of 1m tonnes of both corn and wheat among measures to preserve domestic stockpiles.

Mr Yauhar discussed the idea of "regional and international" food reserves at a meeting with the Chinese government earlier this week.

However, the food stockpiling idea has met with a cooler welcome from some other governments, including that of Australia, the second-ranked wheat exporter, which warned that reserves "can have a negative impact on prices and production".

The move is also seen as unlikely to gain the support of the US, which has abandoned stockpiling ideas experimented with in the decades following World War II.

Extra corn exports

Separately, Mr Yauhar unveiled the release for export of a further 2.75m tonnes of corn from Argentina's 2011-12 crop, harvested earlier this year.

The increase will take total shipments from the crop to 16.45m tonnes, he said.

The US Department of Agriculture, whose data set world benchmarks, this week pegged Argentina's 2011-12 corn shipments at 16.0m tonnes.

Argentina's move "goes to show that there is no threat of a global food crisis at present, although we must continue to be vigilant and monitor the situation closely", Mr da Silva said.