P6.2B in savings seen if PH won’t waste rice

SCIENCE CITY OF MUÑOZ—The government can save at least P6.2 billion worth of rice import funds if each Filipino will save two tablespoons of cooked rice that usually go to waste every day, an economist at the Philippine Rice Research Institute (PhilRice) here said.

Dr. Flordeliza Bordey said the amount of rice that is wasted each day “easily translates into 308,833 tons of raw rice per year.”

Bordey is the spokesperson for the Food Staple Plan of the Philippine Food Staples Self-Sufficiency Roadmap (FSSR). The roadmap offers strategies that would enable the country to be self-sufficient in rice by 2013, and to sustain sufficiency until 2016, the year when President Aquino ends his term.

If each Filipino consumes 119 kilograms of rice yearly, accumulating the wasted two tablespoons of rice by each person could feed approximately 2.6 million people for a year, Bordey said.

Preventing waste would also lead to rice sufficiency for a year, sparing the government from spending P6.2 billion in rice imports for that period, she said.

The roadmap encourages households to calculate the sufficient amount of rice a family could reasonably consume in a day. It also discouraged families from over-washing rice in order to “control the loss of nutrients.”

Arnold Juliano, a PhilRice engineer, advocated the practice of conservation techniques in rice farms, saying improper harvest and post-harvest operations by farmers may also lead to a 15-percent loss of palay (unhusked rice), which is equivalent to 15 cavans out of every 100 cavans of palay that are harvested.

“At P17 a kg, the loss could be worth P12,750,” he said. A cavan of rice is equivalent to 50 kg.

PhilRice experts have recommended that harvest be done when 80 percent of rice grains turn golden yellow. “Harvesting and threshing on time ensure good grain quality and increase milling recovery,” said Juliano.

Farmers were also advised to use rice hull-powered flatbed dryers that can process 6 tons of rice in one operation when it rains or during cloudy days.

Juliano said proper drying reduces the risk of palay spoilage and the odds of grain discoloration.