On Empty Rice Bowl

We’ve been eating nothing else but rice even way before Merdeka. Once people used to say, if you can’t fight or perform a certain task well, it is like you didn’t eat enough rice. In Malaysia, in-spite of all the talks about dieting, most of us eat rice at least twice a day. If you are a nasi lemak fan, maybe you would eat rice three times a day. For some folks in some states, rice is their standard breakfast. Not just nasi lemak but nasi dagang, nasi kerabu as well as various delicacies made from glutinous rice.

Malaysia is a rice country. We eat the ordinary white rice, the nasi tomato, nasi biryani, nasi minyak, nasi kandar, Hainanese chicken rice, rice porridge and the lesser known nasi rawan. For the nasi goreng, although we don’t have such things as nasi goreng Johor or nasi goreng Penang, we do have nasi goreng Thai, nasi goreng Pattaya and even nasi goreng USA.

Without doubt, rice is the centre of our existence. No Malays, nor Chinese, or Indians in Malaysia, no matter how much Mat Salleh they are trying to be, would be able to survice without eating rice for a long period of time. Even the non-rice eating immigrants of Malaya, like the Arabs finally adopted themselves in having rice as their staple food.

When the British were around, they didn’t think much about the economy of rice. You eat rice so you plant rice. There was no effort on the behalf of the colonial government to enhance either the yield per acre or the acreage itself. Even the pricing was left to the simple acts of buying and selling of the commodity. The long-term effect of supply demand of rice was never really on their agenda.

When we took over, we too didn’t pay much attention to this aspect of rice economy. We were happy with the statistics – 70 percent of which we produce our own and the rest relying on the importation from other rice producing countries. We thought it is cheaper to import rather than to be self-subsistent and we thought this trend is going to last till the end of time.

For 50 years we failed to correct this. We have forgotten that we cannot rely on others for a commodity as strategic as this. Now the Thai Government is beginning to talk about creating a rice cartel in the same way as OPEC does for oil.

If such cartel were to materialized, which I think it might just be around the corner now, the price of the importation of rice from Thailand or other rice exporting countries would be several times higher than even if we were to produce the insufficient balance on our own.

The question now is: Are we, the people, would have to pay for the differences in the price of rice, or will the Government allow further subsidies?

Given the fact that our own rice bowl is steadily depleting because the older generation of paddy planters are slowly dying and the new generation don’t really think it would be worth their effort economically to continue what their fathers had done, the future of rice certainly looks gloomy.

It is rather funny that while we are Merdeka from the British, we are never “merdeka” from relying on others to feed us with our very own staple food.