Rice, Trade and Biotechnology in the Philippines (excerpted) by Steve Suppan

As in most South East Asian countries, rice is the basic staple food of the Philippines, where it is grown on about a third of all farmland by an estimated one million rural households. However, growing rice by no means assures one of having enough to eat. According to a 1986 report, farm children in Central Luzon, the Philippine rice bowl, had among the highest rates of malnutrition in the country. During the 1980s about 70% of all Filipinos were 40-60% deficient in protein intake and 40-80% deficient in caloric intake.2 In 1995, the Philippine National Statistics Board estimated that one out of five of all Filipinos could not afford to feed themselves. That year two out of five Philippine families fell below the official poverty line of 7,212 pesos (about U.S.$277) annual income.

Despite this perilous state of food insecurity, the government was ill-prepared for the crisis that erupted in August 1995, when the price of rice doubled throughout the country. The rice price jump consumed at least a fifth of the official minimum daily wage. To avoid food riots, the government's mobile rice caravans distributed the meager rice stocks of the National Food Administration (NFA) in Manila's poor neighborhoods