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CABANATUAN CITY—Rushing home after queuing for several
hours to buy a kilogram of rice at a government outlet
here, the bicycle a boy was riding hit a hump, causing
the plastic pack to fall to the ground with the precious
grains thrown all over the place.
Crying,
both for fear of being scolded and of skipping a meal
that day, the boy scooped with his trembling, tiny hands
the scattered rice back into the plastic bag.
The boy
apparently knew what many of the 90 million Filipinos
should understand about wasting rice, and other facts
about the country’s chief staple that accounts for 35
percent of the average daily calorie intake of about 65
percent of Philippine households, where each member eats
100 kg of rice a year.
“We
waste about 25,000 bags of rice every day, enough to
feed more than 3.5 million Filipinos for one day,” said
Dr. Leocadio Sebastian, executive director of the
Philippine Rice Research Institute (PhilRice).
Josue
Falla, of the
Philippine-Sino
Center for Agricultural Technology,
added that wastage of rice at the household level is as
more important as the losses that occur at the farm
level from harvesting through milling, which has so far
been recorded at 12 percent of the production
investments.
Falla
said: “At the household level, wastage in rice may also
be quantitative and qualitative. For example, the
Filipino way of washing rice twice or thrice before
cooking may lead to loss of nutrients, and if the person
doing it is not careful, grains of rice may be wash
away, too.”
During
the Marcos martial-law period, part of the social
discipline imposed was prohibiting the use of rice to
shower as confetti to newlyweds to bid them good luck.
“While
this is still practiced in some places, such unnecessary
rice wastage has been addressed slowly, anyway,” Falla
noted.
In many
Philippine farming communities, villages let grains of
rice spilled on the ground for chicken feed. Some
allocate half of the family’s rice to their dogs and
cats, it was also observed.
“It is
about time Filipinos should learn to save rice, as well
as understand many unheard facts about rice,” said Falla.
Besides
rice wasting notes, Falla referred to other rice facts
and figures which are deemed important to Filipinos,
especially the young.
For
instance, the
Philippines
ranks third (100 kg a year) in rice consumption in Asia.
According to Rice Awareness Teaching Module, a
high-school home economics guide prepared by the Rice
Media Advocacy Network Philippines (RMAN), the average
person in Myanmar eats 195 kg of rice a year, while in
Laos and
Cambodia
a person consumes 160 kg. The average European eats 3
kg, while the American, 7 kg.
Three of
the world’s most populous nations—China, India and
Indonesia with a combined population of 2.5 billion, or
half of the world’s—depend on rice for their daily meal,
too, data from Asia Rice Foundation showed.
Every
year 50 million people are added to
Asia’s ever-increasing population of 3.5 billion.
What is
eaten today is the “domesticated” rice grass, which
belongs to the species Oryza sativa with more than
140,000 varieties listed so far. The other species is
Oryza glaberrima.
Rice
domestication, or cultivation, had a vague historical
origin although “the most convincing archeological
evidence” was discovered in Non Nok Tha in Thailand in
1966, upon pottery shards bearing the imprint of both
grains and husks of O. sativa.
Migrants
from
China
and North Vietnam were said to have brought the
wetland-rice cultivation to the Philippines during the
Second Millennium or about 4,000 years ago, said the
Rice Awareness Teaching Module.
Noted
Philippine anthropologist F. Llanda Jocano, in his
introduction to the book, published by the
Centro Escolar University,
Beyond Rice: “Rice figures prominently in the symbolic
realm of Filipino culture. It is a symbol of love. His
procurement of rice to feed the family is paramount in
the mind of all married Filipinos.
“Rice is
also a symbol of social status and power. The more
grains one has stored, the higher his status in the
community,” Jocano added.
“In
trying to save rice, especially in these times of
perceived crisis,” Falla stressed, “also gives a sense
of patriotism.” The name of the Philippine national
hero, Jose Rizal, incidentally, comes from the French
word “riz” which means rice. |
