Rice Imports in the Philippines - A study of reasons and causes for massive rice imports in the Philippines
| Autor: | Vincent G. Tenchavez, 涂聖文 |
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| Druh dokumentu: | 學位論文 ; thesis |
| Popis: | 99 Rice is the number one staple food in the Philippines. On a typical day, a typical Filipino would include rice in the three basic meals: breakfast, lunch, and dinner. For most Filipinos, no meal is complete without rice (David C. Dawe, et al, 2005). Rice is always a major part of the main course. And a meal without rice is not a meal at all by Filipino standards. Rice is so much embraced by the Filipino food culture that even a lot of Filipino traditional desserts have rice as the basic ingredient. Examples of such desserts are: sapin-sapin, suman, palitaw, etc. Being a country with a population estimation of 101,833,938 people for July 2011 (CIA, The World Factbook 2011), Philippines has to support a massive number of people and their high demand for rice consumption. It is not by chance that rice became the primary staple food in the Philippines. Being a huge archipelago of a country blessed with wide fertile lands, Philippines would seem initially and obviously capable of supporting the supply and demand for rice, as well as other crops. World Rice Statistics (2011) indicates that the Philippines has around 300,000 square kilometers, of which around 43,000 square kilometers of harvested area are used for rice production. Given the history of rice in the Philippines, and the resources that this country has in terms of land resources, human labor, and capable farming machinery, as well as favorable crop-growing tropical climate, it is quite puzzling how a country like this would still need to import rice to satisfy the demands. An initial assessment would point to a conclusion that there is no need for importing rice since the country is capable of producing more than enough rice locally. But the Philippines is indeed importing rice. In 1996, the Philippines was importing 59,000 metric tons and it has increased to a staggering 440,000 metric tons in 2011 (Necessito, 2011). This study, therefore, would like to study the validity of the need of Philippines to import rice to satisfy the demand of the population. The aim of this study is to look into the reasons and factors for such a phenomenon, and to find out whether there is a relationship between history, population, rice production, government policies, the economy, and even geography and weather, as well as other factors, with rice imports. |
| Databáze: | Networked Digital Library of Theses & Dissertations |
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