Soaring rice prices 'could sow unrest'

Straits Times 20 Mar 08;

Spectre of riots by hungry people looms over poor countries, rice expert warns

LOS BANOS (THE PHILIPPINES) - AS THE price of rice hovers near record levels, many poor countries face the spectre of riots by hungry people, according to one of the world's leading rice experts.

Key producers India and Vietnam have curtailed exports, sending some of the world's largest rice importers, including the Philippines, scrambling to procure supplies for their people.

The spot price - the price that is quoted for immediate payment and delivery of a commodity - recently hit more than US$700 (S$970) a tonne, more than three times the price five years a go.

Industry officials in Thailand, the world's top exporter, have warned that the price of rice could rise to US$1,000 a tonne.

Vietnam, the world's thirdlargest exporter of the grain, also faces the prospect of a return of the deadly crop disease that affected its crop yield badly last year.

These are just some of the problems that keep Mr Robert Zeigler, head of the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), up late at night.

Located at Los Banos, a university town south of Manila, Irri is regarded as the one of the world's premier centres for rice research.

Looking out across padi fields from his office, Mr Zeigler quoted a Latin American saying: 'When the price of rice rises, governments fall.'

'If people don't have enough to eat and they don't have enough money to buy enough to eat, that translates frequently into social unrest,' he told AFP in an interview.

The US-born expert said the Bangladesh cyclone, flooding in Java, a plague of pests and virus in Vietnam, and surging demand from explosive economic growth in China and India, the world's principal rice producers and consumers, have drained global stocks.

'I worry about Indonesia because it has been trying to source rice,' he said.

'I'm concerned about just about every country in Africa, because they're all major rice importers and rice has become a staple. A few years ago, rice was a luxury for them.'

New Delhi raised its export price recently to US$750 a tonne while Vietnam has been 'slow to release licences for export' after blocking exports in the middle of last year, Mr Zeigler said.

He said there was a real threat of social unrest in Bangladesh as floods had virtually wiped out its entire rice harvest. And he warned: 'It's not in India's national security and interest to have instability in Bangladesh.'

He said that when IRRI was established in 1960, it developed high-yielding, short-stemmed rice varieties which heralded the so-called Green Revolution, boosting global output, cutting food prices and lifting hundreds of millions of rice-eating Asians out of poverty.

But now there are two billion more people to feed on essentially the same area of farmland, he said. Government investments in farm research and infrastructure, including irrigation, have plunged to 'well under half' of pre-Green Revolution levels, he added.

Yield growth has also flattened out as populations have soared, and policymakers were blind-sided by the rise of the biofuels industry that took away more farmland, and grains themselves, from the food chain.

'Now we're paying the price of complacency,' he said.

AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE