ASEAN Readies Ample Rice Stocks For El Nino

General Santos City, Philippines - With another long dry spell or El Nino Phenomenon looming to hit the Philippines and Indonesia, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) has intensified the continuing buildup of the region‘s emergency rice stocks to avert a possible food shortage in the coming months.

Dr. Surin Pitsuwan, ASEAN secretary-general, said the region‘s agriculture and forestry ministers are currently working to ensure that the area‘s rice production will be adequate and their distribution and stockpile effective enough to guarantee a stable rice supply when the predicted drought eventually intensifies.

“We have a guarantee to supply 10 to 15 per cent of the requirements of our member-states in case a food shortage happens,” he said in an interview with a group of Southeast Asian journalists at the sidelines of the ASEAN ministerial meetings in Phuket, Thailand last week.

El Niño is caused by warming of the seas in the Pacific and is associated with increased rainfall across the east-central and eastern Pacific but with drier than normal conditions over northern Australia, Indonesia and the Philippines.

Earlier this month, the United States Climate Prediction Center, an office under the US National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration, said that the continued warming of portions of the Pacific Ocean indicates signs of a transition to El Niño conditions.

It said climatic patterns showed a looming “weak-to-moderate strength El Niño” towards the second half of 2009 and will likely extend up to early 2010.

In the case of the Philippines, the Philippine Atmospheric Geophysical and Astronomical Services Administration said in an advisory that among the areas that will likely be affected by the El Niño are the eastern and central Mindanao, eastern Visayas, Bicol and Cagayan Valley.

Surin said there has been a series of discussions at the regional level during the past two years to help the region better prepare for such climate change impact and cited that ASEAN experts and have come up with mechanisms and analysis in anticipation of these problems.

In terms of food supply, he said ASEAN‘s major rice producing nations - Thailand, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and Myanmar - have agreed to increase their allocation for the region‘s emergency stockpile.

He said ASEAN+3 countries China, Japan and Korea have also contributed to augment the region‘s rice stockpile.

“We have learned our lesson from the past disasters that hit the region and we don‘t want to see images of people again queuing up for long hours (for a few of kilos of rice),” he said.

Citing the experience of the region last year when rice prices increased to all-time highs, he said ASEAN member-states have now “learned to accommodate each other” after seeing how “politically-sensitive” such situation was for some member-states, like the Philippines and Indonesia.

A global surge in rice prices in early 2008 and a sluggish local production triggered a drastic increase in local rice prices to as high as P50 per kilo in some parts of Mindanao.

The crisis caused long queues for subsidized imported rice stocks offered through a limited distribution scheme by the national government. 

Surin said that despite earlier pronouncements from some ASEAN‘s rice-producing countries of their plans to put up a cartel-style of operations, specifically the establishment of an Organization of Rice-Producing Countries or OREC, he said “in the end, they realized that it‘s not what we want to put up here in the region.” 

“We want to see a market mechanism that will help us distribute equally the wealth to our farmers and to our consumers but not to organize something like a cartel,” he added.

Southeast Asia, which is home to 570 million people, consumes about 68 million tons of milled rice a year, according to the United States Department of Agriculture.

The Philippines, considered as the world‘s biggest rice importer, reportedly brought in 1.9 million tons of rice last year, about 15 percent of its domestic needs.

However, Department of Agriculture repeatedly claimed that the country‘s total rice production is only short of around five percent of its total rice requirements. Allen V. Estabillo

Source: http://www.mindanews.com
Photo: http://australianetworknews.com

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