Philippines Caught in Rice Squeeze

The dry-season harvest is underway at a rice farm in Laguna province in the Philippines. A spike in world prices this spring has increased the price of rice sold from this farm by about 50 percent over last year. (By Blaine Harden -- The Washington Post)
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Thanks to a research-driven surge in rice yields that was part of the Green Revolution of the 1960s, rice symbolism across Asia has never been so good, at least until last month.

The largest rice-eating nations -- China and India -- usually grow more than enough for domestic consumption.

Even the Philippines, which buys 7 percent of total world rice imports, produces about 90 percent of the rice its 90 million people need. The amount of land planted in rice is at record levels here, and the crop has increased annually for years.

The pan-Asian surge in rice yields, though, has had a perverse effect. It convinced many governments that they no longer needed to invest in research and extension services aimed at improving harvests.

As a result, spending on those programs has been stagnant or falling for 15 years. The International Rice Research Institute has lost half its funding over that time, Zeigler said. He added that the U.S. Agency for International Development has this year zeroed out its funding for the institute.

An Import-Export Divide

Membership in Asia's separate and unequal rice clubs -- importers and exporters -- is determined by relative amounts of land and water.

The standout exporters are Thailand, Vietnam and Cambodia, which have fertile river deltas with land and climate that are nearly perfect for rice cultivation. At the other extreme are countries such as Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines. These island nations have limited land area, transport complications, problems with typhoons and long histories as importers of rice.

Thanks to the recent surge in prices and the resulting alarm among Asian governments, rice researchers and farm economists say that long-term prospects for research-driven increases in rice yields in Southeast Asia as a whole are excellent, given the region's natural advantages.

But rice self-sufficiency in a nation such as the Philippines is a much taller order -- one that is defied by history, weather and a population growth rate that is among the highest in Asia.

"Over the past 100 years, no matter what we do, we have almost always been importing rice," said Rolando Dy, executive director of the Center for Food and Agribusiness at Manila's University of Asia in the Pacific.

Imports for the Poor

To work toward the symbolically important but geographically unrealistic goal of rice self-sufficiency, the Philippine government has a long, costly and ultimately unsuccessful history of limiting imports.

The professed goal is to motivate Philippine farmers -- with higher prices in a protected market -- to grow as much rice as they can.