GRAIN Hybrid Rice Blog
[the Philippine rice crisis is just one of] the signs “of an inherent crisis – that of market capitalism and trade liberalisation policies that many developing countries reliant on foreign debt are forced to accept. The Philippines is a good example of a country that was pushed to ignore its own food production and liberalise its industries, including rice, in order to comply with its many commitments, such as the IMF-WB’s structural adjustment programmes, the WTO Agreement on Agriculture, and FTAs with several countries.”
The recent price hike in rice has caused many people, from Asia to Africa, to panic. Expectedly, perhaps, as more than half of the world’s population depend on rice for food, most of them the poorest of the poor. In the Philippines alone, the ‘shortage’ triggered daily long queues of low-income people in different parts of Metro Manila desperate to buy a few kilos of subsidised imported rice, rationed by the government’s National Food Authority. The price of commercial rice was high enough to affect even the middle class. The purported reason: short supply in the mark
