Facing a looming rice shortage, the Philippines has come up with a novel way to conserve the staple cereal – eat less.
Manila newspapers said the government has asked the country’s fast food outlets to offer half portions of rice.“I’m asking fast-food restaurants to give their customers an option to order half a cup of rice,†Agriculture Secretary Arthur Yap was quoted as saying. “People don’t really finish their rice.†Fast-food restaurants such as Jollibee, McDonalds and KFC are popular among Filipino families, especially those on low incomes, and serve rice with most of their meals.
The Philippines is struggling to source supplies of up to 1.8 million metric tons of rice this year amid tight global supply and surging prices. The Department of Agriculture has warned of a rice deficit of 2.1 million metric tons this year.
Meanwhile, in anticipation of a rice deficit, the Philippines is spending an additional 36.12 million dollars on higher yielding rice varieties, officials said Wednesday.
Yap said the threat faced by the country was “unprecedented (because) internationally, the rice supply is so thin,†making it harder for the country to import from abroad. The government was already preparing for the traditional lean months in rice production of June to September. “We are doing what we can to ensure we have no shortage and we have no shortage now,†he told reporters, saying the country still had a 57-day stock of rice.
Yap said that Arroyo had allocated an additional 1.5 billion pesos to buy higher yielding rice seeds to be distributed during the country’s traditional rainy season that starts after June to increase production. Aside from this, the National Food Authority (NFA), which is in charge of importing rice, “will have to continue buying... to prepare for the possibility that in the lean months, we will have to rice to distribute,†said Yap.
The NFA this week announced it had bought 335,500 tons of rice mainly from Vietnam, Thailand and Pakistan, to avoid any crisis in the coming months. Yap also cited the need for conservation of rice, saying that government studies found the country was wasting 25,000 sacks of rice everyday.
This was why he requested restaurants to offer smaller portions of rice so they would not leave so much uneaten food, Yap said.
He said the government had successfully increased rice production to a record 16.3 million tons in 2007 despite a prolonged drought and had been steadily been posting gains in output. Despite this, the price of rice had risen by two to three pesos per kilogram over the past year, Yap said.
Rice is a politically-sensitive commodity in this archipelago and sharp increases in its price or shortages in supply have sparked popular unrest. The country has long been an importer of rice and not even increases in local production have been able to meet local demand. In 2007 Manila imported 1.871 million tons of rice, mostly from Vietnam with a little from Thailand and the government expects to import more than two million tons this year. — AFP
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