Although rice is the fastest growing source of food in Africa, the continent’s rice production has been unable to keep pace with increases in demand triggered by population growth and rapid urbanization. Currently, Africa accounts for one-third of global rice imports, a ratio that is expected to increase further if nothing is done to expand local rice production.
In many African countries, domestic rice sells at a discounted price due to its inferior quality. Poor harvesting, threshing, drying and storing practices generally lead to good paddy being mixed with damaged grains and foreign matter. Until recently, the emphasis has been on increasing rice production, but equal importance needs to be given to improving the quality of locally produced rice, if it is to compete with imported rice.
To help increase the demand for local rice, the Africa Rice Center (AfricaRice) recently launched a pioneering project that aims to improve the quality and marketability of rice in eight pilot countries in West and East Africa. The ‘Support to Rice Research in Africa’ (SRRiA) initiative is currently looking at ways of enhancing harvest and post-harvest rice processing technologies in Cameroon, Gambia, Ghana, Mali, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone and Uganda.
Smallholder farmers and processors in the target countries will be trained to apply the technologies themselves, while local households will be provided with opportunities to increase their incomes through the development of new rice-based products and rice by-products.
“The reduction of postharvest losses of 10% will help increase farmers’ nominal annual income by about USD32 million in the eight pilot countries by 2020,” said AfricaRice economist Dr. Aliou Diagne.
Funded by the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), SRRiA will feed the results of its research into national and regional agricultural policies that target the rice sector.
Laudable project.
BUT, the fact that locally produced rice in developing countries, can not compete with imported rice is NOT just an issue of quality.
“Foreign” rice is often produced with subsidies by the foreign governments, and “dumped” against prices way below local rice prices.
This is how the IMF and the US completely undermined the local rice production in Haiti (which was 100% food-selfsufficient in the 80′s until the IMF forced them to open up their import to foreign food products).
And this is how the IMF and the US will completely destroy the local rice production in the Dominican Republic, once that country is forced to lift its high import tax on foreign rice. I predict that, while the Dominican is self-sufficient in rice at this moment (and actually has an over-production of about 400,000 tons per year), ten years from now, there will hardly be any rice cultivated anymore. We analysed their cost in depth. And it shows clearly that the cost of their local rice production are just too high to compete with cheap American subsidized rice, even though they produce a very high quality rice, well stored, processed and packaged.
IMF and its global trade rules (imposed by Western countries), only serves Western countries, who are all too happy to dump their food overproduction onto the markets of developing country. A way to get rid of their overproduction, which is mainly due to farming subsidies.
A self-serving Western approach.
That being said, the IRRI project is laudable, and WILL increase the competitiveness of locally produced rice in Africa.
The Project to Increase Quality Rice Production in Africa is being carried out by AfricaRice.
Re your point on overproduction and dumping of imported rice in Africa, the news reports that we have seen since the last 3-4 years indicate that the era of cheap rice is over. Global rice stocks are dwindling and the rice area in the major production countries has been decreasing because of the conversion of land for other purposes.
Sorry, I stand corrected: AfricaRice, not IRRI :-)
On the current global rice production: I don’t agree. The latest USDA figures (Sept 2011) indicate a clear INCREASE in rice production for this year (again):
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The 2011/12 global rice production forecast was raised by 2.1 million tons this month to a record 458.4 million tons (milled basis) (…) Global ending stocks for 2011/12 are projected at 98.7 million tons, up 0.7 million tons from last month and 2 percent larger than a year earlier. This is the fifth consecutive increase in global ending stocks, with global ending stocks the highest since 2002/03.
”
Source: http://usda01.library.cornell.edu/usda/current/RCS/RCS-09-13-2011.pdf
Even though, I agree that the price of rice is going up (from $411 to $501 from Jan 2011 to October 2011 according to FAO for white Broken Rice, Thai A1 Super, f.o.b Bangkok, as an indicator) , the industrialized countries still have an overproduction of subsidized rice, and are still looking for export markets of that subsidized rice.
My (first hand) figures on the comparison of rice production/prices in the Dominican Republic versus the US date from June 2010. Even though the world rice market prices have gone up since then, this is -by far- insufficient to bridge the gab between the price of US subsidized rice and local Dominican rice.
Interested reading on the case of Haiti: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-11472874:
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A leading aid agency has called on the United States to stop subsidising American rice exports to Haiti, the poorest country in the western hemisphere, because it says the policy undermines local production of food.
Former US President Bill Clinton, one of the architects of the subsidies to US farmers – and who is now, paradoxically, the co-chair of Haiti’s earthquake recovery Commission – is quoted by Oxfam as saying that the policy was “a mistake”.
”
Even more interesting reading: US government subsidies to their rice production industry totalled 13 billion in the period 1995-2010: http://farm.ewg.org/progdetail.php?fips=00000&progcode=rice
(which, strangely enough (?) comes scary-ly close to the amount of US foreign food aid. Would it be a perfect “aid export – farm subsidy”-match when we add the subsidies of US corn production?)
As your project is about rice production in Ghana, check this (even though a 2005 article, the argument still stands) http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2005/apr/11/hearafrica05.development:
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Between them, the US, Japan and the EU subsidised their rice production by $16bn (£8.48bn) in 2002, the latest year for which full data are available. The US policy is particularly harmful for the rice-growers of Ghana. In 2003, the US paid $1.3bn in rice subsidises to its farmers and sold the crop for $1.7bn, effectively footing the bill for 72% of the crop.
”
and
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In the early 1980s conditions attached to loans given to Ghana by the IMF and the World Bank resulted in the country liberalising its markets and cheap imported rice flooding the market. The IMF and World Bank now admit that such conditions do not help the world’s poor but reversing the damage of such policies is difficult.
”
BUT your argument (and your project) still stands according to the same article:
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Bags of imported rice reach to the ceiling of Charles Yeboah’s long, narrow shop. He does not stock Ghanaian rice. “I can’t sell it. The quality of the imported rice is so much better that even though it costs more, people buy it,” he says.
”
THUS: if your project can increase the quality of the Ghanian rice, their competitveness will increase. My point is: this effect would be dramatically higher, and your project would have a bigger impact, if the West stops dumping subsidized rice in developing countries. (and if the IMF/WorldBank would encourage that self-serving policy)
:-)