Why Are Americans Hoarding Rice?

I read that Sam's Club and then Costco were starting to ration rice. I heard on NPR that the big discount grocers didn't want to raise prices, because they make their money mostly on memberships, and prefer to keep bulk prices low. Both insisted that they were merely trying to assure that all of their stores had enough rice for their customers and there was no real rice shortage in the United States, which produces 88% of its own rice. A friend in Oregon City, OR noticed last night that the shelf which usually holds rice in her local grocer was empty. Someone else asked how long Basmati white rice took to steam, after they bought it for the first time in ten years. Why were people panicking? Should I rush out and stockpile rice?

The rationing occurred at a time of rising energy prices, high fertilizer cost, financial speculation, drought in some rice producing regions and increasing demand. The price of certain types of rice rose 50% in just a few months' time, much harder to absorb in the poorest parts of the world than in the US. In our own hemisphere, in Haiti, more expensive rice sparked food riots that required government intervention to quell. There were food riots in Egypt, a general strike in Burkina Faso, and distribution by the military in the Philippines. Some countries banned exports, to keep more supply at home. Overall, prices rose 68% from baseline.

The World Bank warned recently that higher food prices could push 100 million people in poorer developing countries further into poverty. Robert Zoellick, head of the World Bank related the demand for ethanol and other biofuels to soaring food prices around the world. He held up a bag of rice during his press conference as he said, "In Bangladesh a two-kilogram bag of rice ... now consumes about half of the daily income of a poor family; the price of a loaf of bread ... has more than doubled. Poor people in Yemen are now spending more than a quarter of their incomes just on bread." He added that many people in the world were moving from one meal a day to two at a time when biofuels were expanding. (In the past two years, the price of corn more than doubled in the US, partly because of the demand for ethanol.) He projected that food prices would stay high or go higher over the next couple of years.

Salon asked my question: "Where has all the rice gone?," and suggested one possible alternative:

The suggested that corn price hikes could be attributed to biofuels and wheat increses to bad weather, but that world rice production was actually up so that the culprit may be primarily population growth and increased consumption. They further reported that the China-Africa Development Fund had pledged five billion dollars over the next fifty years for investment in African agriculture, specifically for rice production. That won't change rice prices much in the short term, but it shows that China is thinking ahead in promoting Africa as a next breadbasket for the world. We also need to plan carefully for biofuel expansion, and make sure that crops for eating aren't being pushed out too fast (and in the wrong places) in favor of ways to continue using far too much energy.

Doug Tarnapol from Free Expressions blog mused:

Upon Glancing at the Providence Journal Today...nowhere will you find word one about the international food crisis. Meanwhile, the "liberals" (not all, of course) are pushing biofuels: fill your tank with food from people's mouths, for the benefit of the Archer Daniels Midland Corp (not the "Jeffersonian farmer" Monsanto is currently suing out of existence for not paying for their naturally -- or intentionally -- dispersed, copyrighted GMOs). After the coming economic cataclysm (already here for most people), ya think people will finally rise up and overthrow the global neoliberal regime? Think Obama will lead that fight here in the US?

I think South America is the brightest spot, relatively speaking, in the world right now: they are pointing, messily, toward the only possible future for the species. (Example of "messy": Lula is pro-biofuels -- and not the non-edible kind, either. Even non-edible biofuels will displace all other crops due to rising demand, and not just in the US/EU but in India, China, everywhere.) Basically, if we, the species, do not rein in our consumption, we are in for a Malthusian "correction" that will literally rival the Black Plague. Yet, readers of the New York Times, a.k.a., "the people that matter," think they can buy their way out of any crisis.

Oh, but ProJo is all over the big story of the pie thrown at Tom "How Much Blood Is On My Hands?" Friedman. Should have been a brick, in my opinion: we should send that tub of propagandistic lard over to India to try farming in view of the wonderful laboratories and golf courses he loves so. With any luck, he'll join the thousands of farmers who have committed suicide under the "flat-earth" policies he's been touting. When will people finally realize that the Owners consider us the enemy, and act accordingly?

To which I replied with this quote:

'We are grateful to the Washington Post, the NY Times, Time Magazine, and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected their promises of discretion for almost 40 years. It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subjected to the lights of publicity during those years. But now the world is more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world government. The supra national sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national auto-determination practiced in past centuries.'

David Rockefeller, Private Banker, Council on Foreign Relations, June 1991...