Word: rices
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...April 2, local police and officers from the Philippines National Bureau of Investigation descended on a four-story warehouse in suburban Manila. They were acting on a tip-off about possible illicit activity. But the agents weren't searching for drugs or knockoff Rolexes. They were looking for rice. The inspection was part of a nationwide effort to nab profiteers who, taking advantage of sky-high prices for Asia's most basic food, are suspected of repackaging government-subsidized rice and reselling it at higher market rates. Officers have had some success, discovering 27,000 bags of rice...
...That's a question millions of Asians are asking. Across the region, the price of food, from wheat to pork, is increasing at dizzying rates. But it is rice, the foundation of Asia's diet and a potent symbol of its cultures, that is causing the most anxiety. In Thailand, Vietnam, Bangladesh, India, Pakistan and elsewhere, the price of rice has doubled in the past year, a hike that hurts all the more because Asian families often spend half of their weekly budget on food, more than double what Western households spend. In an effort to contain spiraling domestic prices...
...thing if you can't find pork at your local market. You can always buy chicken. But rice has no good substitute in many Asian diets. In Mandarin, the word for rice is also the word for food. The Thai phrase "to eat" translates as "eat rice." "Rice isn't just another commodity," says Robert Zeigler, director general of the International Rice Research Institute in Manila. "In Asia, rice has cultural, social and, in many places, even a religious role, so it carries much more psychological weight." Indeed, Asian nations have reacted to the mere prospect of shortage with something...
...Global Exposure The world still grows plenty of rice, more than 420 million metric tons last year, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. But prices are spiking for several reasons: rising long-term demand in countries such as China and India, where millions of increasingly prosperous people are eating more; short-term supply shocks thanks to unusually cold weather and pest infestation in Vietnam, the world's second largest supplier of rice; and the diversion of a huge chunk of America's corn crop to ethanol production, which has boosted demand for other staples, including rice...
...economic dynamics, as they play out in national markets, can be even more complicated. Take India, for example, where rice prices are rising fast, contributing to 7% inflation last month, the highest in more than three years. The country is not suffering from a classic case of tight supplies. National rice production this year should hit 94 million metric tons, up more than 2 million metric tons from last year and more than 20 million metric tons from 2003's crop, which was devastated by a bad monsoon. Nor have shortages hit a government-run rice-distribution program that helps...