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TOP Philippine fast-food chains have agreed to offer half servings
of rice amid a supposedly looming shortage in the country’s rice
supply, media reports said on Tuesday.
Popular fast-food chain Jollibee now offers
half-rice servings at P5.50 (13 US cents) each. A full cup of rice,
meanwhile, costs P11 (26 cents).
“People like me don’t usually consume a
cupful of rice. I will have that option to get half-cup rice instead
of wasting the remaining half,” said Maila Maquilan, Jollibee
Foods Corp.’s corporate communications manager.
Chowking, Jollibee’s sister company,
meanwhile, will start offering half-cup rice at P8 (19 cents) per
order serving starting Tuesday. A full cup will cost P16 (38 cents).
Max’s Restaurant and McDonald’s have
promised to follow suit in the coming days, Philippine TV network
ABS-CBN News reported.
Agriculture Secretary Arthur Yap said serving
half-cups of rice would benefit customers who cannot consume one
whole cup of rice in one sitting.
Yap, meanwhile, urged the public to cook just
the right amount of rice for their needs. His appeal came after a
government study said around P22-million ($528,000) worth of rice or
25,000 sacks go to waste daily.
He said it is very difficult to educate the
public on saving on rice consumption especially when they see that
there is still ample supply of the grain. “There are a lot of us
who are going on a diet and would not eat rice during meals so they
should be given an option [to have rice or not],” Yap added.
Non-government organizations as well as some
Philippine politicians have warned the public that the archipelago,
where rice is a staple food, is facing a possible rice crisis.
Filipinos consume some 12 million tons of rice annually, 10 percent
of which are imported from other countries.
Government authorities in Nueva Ecija (Central
Luzon) and La Union (Northern Luzon) said such crisis will not hit
the two provinces.
Nicolas Crisostomo, Central Luzon regional
director of the National Food Authority, said their inventory of 4.5
million bags can feed the people in the seven provinces of the
region for at least 67 days, ahead of the peak harvest season. He
added that this stock is 46 percent higher than that of last year.
Their inventory, Crisostomo said, will be beefed
up by around 2.2 million bags of imported rice that will be
allocated to Central Luzon this year. Of this volume, 403,000 bags
from Vietnam have already arrived at Subic port in Zambales province
in Northern Luzon. The balance of 1.8 million bags will arrive
later.
During the peak harvest season, Crisostomo said,
the food authority will procure rice at P12 per kilo, including
incentives. The volume bought will pad the current inventory. He did
not say what the incentives are.
Their stock at present, according to Crisostomo,
will be made available to 1,500 accredited outlets in Central Luzon.
These outlets will sell the government rice, repacked in one and
two-kilogram plastic bags, at P18.25 per kilo.
Under the hunger-mitigation campaign of the
government, the Food-for-School, Tindahan Natin, and Tindahan sa
Parokya programs are also a priority for the National Food
Authority.
La Union has enough rice supply, according to
Gov. Manuel Ortega.
The province, he said, enjoys “a 128-percent
rice sufficiency” that resulted from its recent harvest that
earned it P722 million.
Ortega explained that the province last year
produced 172,285 metric tons of rice from 37,437 hectares. Hybrid
rice alone, he said, yielded 13,290 metric tons from 2,126 hectares.
A total of 35,419 metric tons or 708,380 bags is
the projected rice production this crop season that starts in April.
Ortega assured President Gloria Arroyo during
her recent visit that La Union will be rice-sufficient until October
2008, the start of the next crop season.
In Manila, Education Secretary Jesli Lapus said
they are confident that the Food-for-School program will not be
affected by the impending rice crisis. He added the program is going
smoothly in the current school year.
The department, through the Health and Nutrition
Center, runs the Food-for-School program, which seeks to address
both malnutrition among and academic performance of
elementary-school children in select schools nationwide, the
center’s director, Thelma Santos, said.
Under the program, each recipient is given a
ration of one kilo of rice each day for 95 days over five months.
The rice is distributed daily before the recipient goes home in the
afternoon to motivate him to go back to school the next day.
If the child is absent, however, no substitute
is allowed to collect the pupil’s rice ration from the school.
Record of pupils’ acceptance of their rice rations is reported by
the teacher and attested by the school principal.
-- Armand M. Galang, James Konstantin Galvez and Xinhua
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