CITY OF SAN FERNANDO – Each Filipino wastes at least two tablespoons of cooked rice every day.
Such volume of wastage could feed 2.6 million hungry people in a year or save the country rice imports worth P6.2 billion annually, the Philippine Rice Research Institute (PhilRice) based in Munoz, Nueva Ecija said.
This, even as PhilRice urged Filipinos to eat more unpolished or brown rice as part of the government’s effort to make the country self-sufficient in rice by 2013.
PhilRice socio-economist and spokesperson of the 2011-2016 Food Staples Self-Sufficiency Program Flordeliza Bordey noted that “countries like Japan and China are rice-sufficient despite their small rice area harvested per capita because of the citizen’s diversified diet.”
Bordey said PhilRice is also pushing rice conservation in households by urging families to cook only as much as their families normally consume and even recycling leftover rice into other dishes, amid an average wastage of two spoonfuls per person each day in the Philippines.
Bordey noted that brown rice “has a higher milling recovery rate of 75 percent compared with 65 percent for white rice,” as she stressed that the campaign for the brown rice consumption is the “rice sector’s commitment to help the country become rice self-sufficient next year as part of the celebration of National Rice Awareness Month (NRAM) this November.”
The month-long celebration, with the theme “Sapat na Bigas, Kaya ng Pinas!,” aims to generate awareness on how consumers could support the country’s goal, she added.
She also noted that PhilRice is also now promoting the consumption of “equally nutritious foods such as white corn, sweet potato, cassava, and banana as substitutes for rice.”
“Brown rice is also more nutritious than white rice for it retains most of the nutrients from the rice bran that are removed by polishing,” Bordey added.
