Business | Opinion
Divestment and wastages threaten global rice output
Inside his northern Philippines granary, Marlon Ventura stirs gray zinc phosphide into a bowl of boiled rice, making a garlicky, toxic meal for rats.
- By By Jason Gale and Luzi Ann Javier, Bloomberg
- Published: 22:40 December 20, 2008
Inside his northern Philippines granary, Marlon Ventura stirs gray zinc phosphide into a bowl of boiled rice, making a garlicky, toxic meal for rats.
He puts the bowl on a dirt floor dotted with grain spilled from vermin-gnawed sacks. Each year, rats steal or foul almost three-quarters of a metric tonne of his rice. The cost - 12,240 pesos (Dh962) - equals 7.8 per cent of his farm's net income.
"I'm frustrated because we've not got any support from the government," says Ventura, 28, who farms with his three brothers and spends 900 pesos a month on rat bait. "When you have very little money, every grain you can save matters."
The world is wasting enough rice this year to feed 184 million people, about a fifth of those who are undernourished, based on estimates from the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations in Rome. Globally, the amount lost between harvest and consumers totals at least 48 million tonnes, says Concepcion Calpe, a senior economist with the FAO.
Rats aren't the only species responsible - humans also play a role. Lulled by low food prices since the 1970s, donor nations and lenders halved aid to agriculture in developing countries between 1984 and 2004, the World Bank says. Corrupt leaders and bureaucrats siphoned off much of what did arrive, according to the US Agency for International Development. As a result, grain storage and processing remain primitive in many developing countries, the ones with the greatest losses and highest rates of hunger.
Food crisis
This lack of investment was among the man-made causes of the food crisis of 2008. Among the other ingredients in this recipe for famine: trade policies that pushed developing nations into global markets and speculators who drove prices higher by doubling bets on grain.
After food price increases in three of the past four years, the number suffering from chronic hunger is approaching 1 billion of the world's 6.8 billion people, the FAO says. At the same time, the UN estimates that at least 15 per cent of all staple crops, including rice, corn and soybeans, will be consumed by pests, spoiled by water leaks or otherwise go to waste after harvest this year.
Rice, a key part of diets in Asia, Latin America and many African countries, has about 3,500 calories per kilogram, according to the FAO. Adults need to consume 2,500 calories a day from carbohydrates, proteins and other nutrients to stave off malnutrition, the agency says. If it were possible to achieve perfect efficiency, the estimated 48 million tonnes of rice losses "would be sufficient to fully meet the average calorie intake of 184 million people per year," Calpe wrote in an e-mail.
In the Philippines, the world's largest rice importer, farms like Ventura's are at the start of a chain of waste that lost about 2.44 million tonnes of the unmilled cereal last year, worth about 31.7 billion pesos (Dh2.49 billion) at November's prices. The tonnage represents about 83 per cent of the country's milled rice imports, and would be enough to feed 6 million of its 93 million people.
Controlling the rat population is just one of Ventura's challenges. The family farm, 137 kilometres north of Manila, produces 36 tonnes of rice a year, generating about 160,000 pesos, or 7.5 per cent less than the national annual average net income.
In his granary, stacks of 50-kilogram sacks are draped with plastic sheets because the roof leaks. Three years ago, 400 kilograms of rice were soaked and ruined.
Ventura estimates that more than 360 kilograms from each of his two harvests - or enough to feed four Filipinos for a year - are spilled, soaked, blown away or eaten by pests. Rats consume two of every 100 bags.
"There's not much else we can do because we just don't have the financial resources," Ventura says.
Ventura's losses could be at least halved by a $7,000 machine that blasts hot air over wet rice laid out on trays, removing the moisture that's the main cause of spoilage. Such dryers are beyond most farmers' means in the Philippines, and for the past 14 years, the government hasn't bought any either. It couldn't afford them, says Rosendo Rapusas, acting deputy director of the national Bureau of Postharvest Research and Extension.
The bureau's 2008 budget is 86.9 million pesos. Filipino farmers lost more than 350 times that amount in rice last year, based on November prices.
"Our budget is too small, so we have to prioritise," Rapusas says. "You can't blame the government. They had other, more pressing priorities."
Those include cleaning up the financial mess left by former President Ferdinand Marcos, a dictator who fled Manila in 1986 amid a popular revolt. In 2005, the government devoted 31 per cent of its budget to interest on foreign debt accrued largely during his regime. The nation now aims to produce 98 per cent of its food needs by 2013. Ventura, a third generation farmer, says he's fed up.
"I wouldn't want the next generation to be farmers," he says. "I'd do everything I can to put my kids through school so they could have a better life."
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