Halve rice portions, restaurants asked
AGRICULTURE Secretary Arthur Yap yesterday asked fast-food outlets to offer half portions of rice to discourage wastage as government scrambles to boost rice supplies.
"We would like to exercise all efforts at ensuring the Philippines rice stocks continue to be maintained at a manageable level to ensure that the food security of the country will be maintained," he said.
"I'm asking fast-food restaurants to give their customers an option to order half a cup of rice because right now, if you do a survey of all the fast-food joints, you will notice a fraction of them always have excess rice. People don't really finish their rice," he added.
The Philippines, one of the world's biggest importers of rice, is struggling to source supplies of up to 1.8 million tons this year as prices sky rocket due to rising demand and tight inventories around the globe.
Yap said the Philippines, where rising harvests cannot keep pace with population growth, was not facing a rice shortage but people should conserve the staple.
The DA said if Filipinos could be more prudent in rice consumption, imports could go down by 37 percent to 1.17 million tons compared to last year's import requirement of 1.87 million tons.
Manila has failed in three consecutive auctions to secure the full volume of rice it needs and is hoping to tap an emergency regional rice fund to help with a potential shortfall.
Thailand has committed to set aside 15,000 tons of rice for the Philippines under the East Asia Emergency Rice Reserve and officials have also contacted Indonesia, Malaysia, Japan and South Korea.
Results for last week's auction for 550,000 tons of rice, which only attracted 355,500 tons of bids, are expected this week.
Manila is also looking to re-tender to buy up to 100,000 tons of rice from the United States after receiving only one bid last week. It is buying the US rice using $65 million in credit guarantees from the US Agriculture Department.
Last month, President Arroyo went outside normal commercial channels to ask Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung to guarantee a supply of up to 1.5 million tons of rice, signalling rising nervousness about tight supply.
Hanoi, however, said it could only guarantee 1 million tons of rice, which already includes a volume of around 700,000 tons, which Vietnamese traders had already agreed to supply in auctions in December and January.
Vietnam sold nearly 1.4 million tons of rice to the Philippines last year.
A non-government organization said Yap should focus his attention more on the price spikes of the staple instead of turning to imports.
Jessica Reyes Cantos, lead convenor of Rice Watch and Action Network (R1), said Yap should instead investigate the abnormal increase in the local rice prices when the harvest season started last January although the lean months are usually in July to September.
"Yap should really start to learn the ropes of running an agriculture portfolio with a coherent food policy based on food self-sufficiency. We challenge him to sit down for an honest-to-goodness discussion on the rice master plan instead of resorting to knee-jerk reactions," Cantos said.
Sen. Manuel Roxas II raised the alarm on a looming rice crisis as global supply tightens.
"According to DA (Department of Agriculture) and NFA (National Food Authority), we will be anticipating a deficit supply of rice of about two months' worth of consumption," he said.
He said the country is safe until October this year, but has to scamper for rice in November, when the shortfall will be strongly felt.
Roxas said the country could not continue to depend on imports from India or China since both countries will have to hedge against the global rice shortage.
"We project that in the future this problem will only get worse. Because India and China won't be sending rice exports here, we must fend for ourselves," he said.
Roxas proposed that government institute new programs for agriculture and expedite the release of calamity fund to local government units to source their own rice supply.
"They said the hybrid rice has been a success but why do we have a shortage in production?" he said.
Roxas favors relaxing the tariff on rice imports, which stands at 40 percent. But he said this would only partially resolve the problem.
Senate President Manuel Villar said he believes government is partly to blame for the "rice crisis" as it failed to curb corruption in the agriculture sector, particularly in dispensing funds for fertilizers.
Villar also said authorities should also look into the alleged rice cartels that control the distribution of rice in the market. - Job Realubit, Dennis Gadil and Reuters
posted by brodkaster43 at Martes, Marso 18, 2008
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