May 19 2008
The Price of Rice
About a month ago, I saw a news article telling me that Sam’s Club and Costco were limiting the number of 25 pounds bags of rice that custoemrs could buy. Until then, the world rice shortage had been backpage news at best. As a 30-something woman, I have never known food rationing in my lifetime, though I’ve read that it was extensive during World War II.
Still, cutting our rice intake to one 25 pound bag per trip to the warehouse store shouldn’t be too difficult. Last year, one 25-pound bag lasted us 11 months and thankfully, I had purchased a new bag of jasmine rice in March before this rice panic came to light.
Now, for those who don’t read the back pages of the newspaper, the problem is pretty simple. In the poorest parts of the world, rice is a staple food of life and they don’t have enough of it. Rice harvests have been smaller, impacted by natural disasters, and the demand keeps growing. In some places (like Haiti), the cost of rice has risen so quickly that the local people are resorting to eating dirt cookies to fill their empty bellies. The cookies don’t do much of anything to stave off malnutrition, but they let people feel a little less hungry.
Just after Sam’s and Costco announced their buyign restriction, Brazil announced it would not be exporting any rice in 2008, because the entire crop was needed to feed its own people. Okay, I’m good with that. Feed your own people before you feed the world. That’s a lesson America could take to heart.
But even knowing all this, I was shocked when it actually affected my life. I figured I had my bag of rice for the next year, so the price increase wouldn’t affect me, right? WRONG!
On Saturday, my husband and i decided to order take out from our favorite local Chinese restaraunt. He gets sesame beef and I get chicken friend rice. We have ordered the same meals there for years and for at least the last two years, the total has been $9.02. I expect it.
But on Saturday, the total was $12.07. Okay, I wasn’t expecting that. Turns out, when I talked to the owner, that New Kahala had raised prices about a month ago to deal with the overall rising prices of food. Okay, we’ve all seen it. Milk and eggs are outrageous these days, when compared to what we are used to paying. The most obvious and simple example for me: Last summer, I paid $1for a bag of sunflower seeds. Last week, that same bag was on sale at the local grocer for 1.29. A twenty-nine percent increase in less than a year.
But the overall jump in food prices was just the beginning. William Lo, one of the owners of the restaraunt, said they had also had to add a surcharge to all their fried rice dishes beginning last week. “When I went to buy a 100-pound bag of rice three weeks ago, it was $15. Yesterday, it was $49,” he said.
For the record, I’m not sure that the worldwide rice shortage occurred in just three weeks, but American awareness of the shortage did. So now, the price of rice has tripled (at least in some places). That’s a 300 percent increase instead of that 30 percent increase that shocked me for other foods.
One friend says she will substitute quinoa, a rice-like grain, as a side dish when she used to use rice. I still have that supply of jasmine rice, so I’ll be using it. But there is a great temptation to start hoarding rice. I can still buy it relatively cheaply in some places and rice stores well for years.
Add that to the fact that the Myanmar cyclone destroyed rice reserves and rice fields there and worldwide demand is going to continue to rise. For me, it’s a shocker and an inconvenience, an expense that I would rather not have. But as I look around me, I see a great many people where tripling the cost of food will make a difference on how much they have to eat or if, as in Haiti, they have food to eat at all.
Somehow, it just doesn’t feel right to let them eat dirt.
