In 2006, every Filipino consumed 118.7 kilos or 2.4 sacks of rice a year. That amounts to a daily per capita rice consumption of 325.21 grams per citizen. The Philippines produces about 90 percent of the rice it needs but also today needs to import up to 2.1 million metric tons, to be able to maintain its two-month inventory. Over the last three months, that inventory has thinned by 20 percent. Vast hectares planted to rice and corn have failed to lift this semi-feudal nation’s status from rice importer to exporter. In 2006, then Agriculture Secretary Domingo Panganiban told Reuters: “Except for a brief period in the seventies, the last time this nation produced enough rice to feed itself was in 1903, the year the Wright brothers (Wilbur and Orville) invented the airplane.”
The alarm bells have been sounded: The world’s rice stocks have dipped to their lowest level in 25 years. The most rosy estimates say the global rice supply could slide to 70 million tons, less than half the 150 million-ton inventory in the year 2000.
Conversely, rice prices have surged to their highest levels in 20 years, trading at $500 to over $700 per ton in recent months. In 2001, the price was slightly above $300 per metric ton only.
Only last January, the Philippines bought rice at only $474.40 per ton, and in two months, the price has surged by 43 percent.
Various reasons have been blamed for the sharp slide in supply: erratic weather; natural disasters; soaring fuel and transport costs; supply hoarding and smuggling; conversion of agricultural lands to cash crops, biofuel production, and other commercial purposes, etcetera.
But from country to country feeding on the staple grain, the context remains the same: galloping population growth rate has unduly stepped up the demand for rice, even as production has remained low or stagnant.
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