TRADE and Industry Secretary Alfredo Pascual must have underestimated the love affair of Filipinos with rice when he suggested that we modify our diet and use other alternatives such as camote and corn as sources for our carbohydrate intake. Instead of taking this as a sensible suggestion to deal with the shortage of the supply of rice that is used as a justification for its importation, he was met with collective outrage. He was even accused of being insensitive.
In my honest opinion, it was just a case of misunderstanding, where Secretary Pascual spoke on a different page compared to many Filipinos. It stems from a fundamental difference in how people interpret the word 'diet.' Pascual used the word to mean changing our eating behavior, by replacing rice with camote and corn, while ordinary Filipinos must have interpreted 'diet' in its common usage as diyeta,' which means not eating at all.
83 times higher than rural wastage, while rice wastage in richer households was 1.38 times higher compared to poorer households.The Philippine Rice Research Institute estimated that rice wastage amounts to P7.2 billion a year, enough to feed 2 million individuals. The average amount of rice wastage daily is about 2 tablespoonfuls. Meanwhile, the Department of Agriculture has estimated a shortage of about 80,000 metric tons of rice from July to the end of September.
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