What do we do with all this rice?
Wednesday, 07/07/2010, 10:37 GMT+7
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What do we do with all this rice?
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Facing oversupply, the government has found creative ways to spark demand.
July 09, 2010
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Korean rice farmers still enjoy large government subsidies to keep growing the staple grain, but massive oversupply means they dread another bumper crop.
When production is hard to cut, the alternative is, of course, to increase consumption. Since last year, that’s exactly what the Korean government has been trying to do.
Its first strategy: Replace wheat with rice. Of 3.63 million tons of wheat consumed last year, 2.15 million tons were used for food, most of it in flour. The state-run “R-10” campaign aims to replace 10 percent of that wheat flour with rice flour, using up 200,000 tons of rice.
Since more than 99 percent of wheat is imported, it would also increase consumption of domestically produced food. The project has a budget of 160 billion won ($132 million) for setting up facilities such as rice flour factories, while 3 billion won will be invested in developing processed food using rice flour as a main ingredient.
The effort seems to be paying off. A slew of major food companies such as Nongshim, Lotte, SPC and DaeSang have proposed new rice-derived foods, increasing their consumption of rice from 8,500 tons in 2008 to 33,000 tons last year.
Nevertheless, some obstacles remain. Compared to wheat flour, rice is hard to grind finely, since the bigger the grain is, the harder it is to process. Taste is another issue. Wheat flour contains gluten, a protein that gives products made using wheat their chewy texture. There’s no gluten in rice, which makes it more difficult to convert those who have grown accustomed to wheat.
To make rice flour also costs three to four times as much as it does to make wheat flour. To tackle that issue, the government is trying to provide 400,000 tons of rice, harvested two years ago and earlier, at the same price as wheat flour. No one knows for how long the plan will continue, since private enterprises are not willing to invest in a market that is not sustainable.
The “Eat More Rice” movement has also spread to everyday life. The Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention revealed 42.5 percent of teens and 30.2 percent of people in their 20s skip breakfast. Why not encourage them to eat rice in the mornings?
Lim Jeong-bin, director of food policy at the Ministry of Food, Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries, said, “If one person eats 1 kilogram [2.2 pounds] of rice a year, the annual consumption of rice grows 50,000 tons per annum.”
The makgeolli craze is another hopeful sign. Many companies have stopped using cheap imported rice and begun using domestic rice, partially at the government’s urging.
The government is also considering turning the grain into feed for livestock to reduce the inventory in overflowing warehouses. Earlier this week, the Agriculture Ministry said it is looking for ways to dispose of rice produced in 2005 by using it as livestock feed. The ministry said the use of rice as livestock feed would help lessen the financial burden weighing on the government.
By switching from corn to rice for livestock feed, the government can secure an additional 20 to 50 won per kilogram than it would selling the rice to makgeolli breweries.
By Choi Hyun-cheol [ebusiness@joongang.co.kr] |
Post by : VNExpress BOT
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