BAGOONG RICE

By Bernie Lopez

’Bagoong’ rice is an exotic fine-dining entrée which has actually been in existence since pre-Hispanic times. It is the food of the very poor in lean months when there is only rice and seasoning of salt, patis or bagoong at the dinner table. The exotic variety was a product of creative packaging and restaurant marketing.

Alternatives to bagoong rice during the lean months include patis-rice, pancit sandwich and other forms of creative pure-starch menus. With shortages and expensive rice and bread, pancit sandwich might evolve into ‘bread sandwich’, if you know what I mean. But alternatives may veer towards non-starch experiments. There will be new creative dishes, I am sure, learning a lesson from Mangyans of Mindoro who eat ‘stones’ in the lean months. It is actually mineral-rich hardened mud-pack found along rivers and creeks, quite nutritious, but you cannot eat a lot of it even if you are very hungry.

I remember the days I covered the Mangyans in Mindoro. There was a big conference at Abra de Ilog which was ‘over-attended’ by about 400 people. ‘Over-attended’ meant 80 Mangyan heads of families were invited but 300 came because they could not leave behind their wives and children at home. So there was panic in the kitchen. The Mangyans said they would take care of breakfast the next day. They woke up at 3 a.m.

When I woke up at 6 a.m., I saw the largest bagoong rice plate of my life, something for the Guinness Book of Records. They laid out huge banana leaves for 30 meters along the school corridor and poured the rice from one end to the other, looking like a white replica of the Cordillera mountain range. On top of the mountain, they poured pure unadulterated bagoong, dark snow-caps on white mountains. There were no utensils, no plates.

The conference attendees lined up on the sides of this bagoong-rice superhighway and we started to eat with our hands. We simply took lumps of bagoong rice and set it in on the free space of the banana leaf along the sides. After breakfast, it was as if the mountain range was hit by a nuclear blast.

It was a noisy spirited breakfast. Everyone was talking. There was a much-appreciated pandemonium. It was one of my best breakfasts for a long time and the ethnic spirit was inspiring. The lesson I learned then was – you can be poor and happy anytime you want, a matter of will power. But there are new lessons to learn today – you have to fight poverty and hunger.

Looking back, if that conference was done today, it would be disaster because there would be less rice and more bagoong, or just boiled kamoteng kahoy or gabi with sugar, the dinner of Mangyans in the lean months. Creative menus are a challenge today not so much on how to prepare but what to prepare.

GLOBAL FOOD CRISIS

With a world food crisis emerging and climate change further undermining food production, Man today is faced with a looming crisis. He must find ways of dealing with a new situation never before encountered in history. He must deal with the planet and with himself at a deeper plane all at once. He must address global warming which must necessarily affect food production. It is a planet dilemma.

One of the main culprits in the world food shortage is the U.S., the biggest corn and soya producer in the world. When it shifted its corn and soya bumper harvests from food for Third World nations to biofuel for local consumption, it essentially caused an instant staple shortage in Africa, which triggered food riots.

The heightened awareness of global food shortage has triggered food export bans everywhere, as in India, Vietnam, Indonesia and Brazil. This has increased the burden on institutions. The Asian Development Bank has pledged food aid, but remember these are loans rather than grants. The African Development Bank has pledged $1 billion. The United Nations and the World Food Programme are mobilizing, but they predict there will not be enough for the increasingly many hungry.

As for rice, Thailand and Vietnam, the two largest exporters of rice worldwide, instituted export bans to insure local supplies after global-warming induced deluge and drought halved production. This started a world rice shortage.

 

Thailand is thinking of organizing a rice cartel similar to the oil cartel. A rice cartel will be composed of the premiere rice nations of Asia, namely, Thailand, Vietnam, Burma or Myanmar, Cambodia, and Laos. This contradicts the promises of food cooperation among ASEAN nations stated in the recent Bali conference. Cartel and cooperation are diametrically opposed. The only way to weaken the clout of a cartel is to have bumper harvests and an oversupply, which is unlikely, considering runaway population growth and global-warm. The ASEAN must stop the rice cartel through pressures based on non-rice trading quid-pro-quos.

The Philippines is the largest importer of rice worldwide, and our government’s knee jerk reaction was to over-buy, to double imports, no matter if prices doubled, anticipating a protracted shortage beyond 2008. Lately, it is thinking of slowing down a bit after it has procured 1.6 million metric tons (MMT), larger than the original target of 1.2 MMT. The obsession to increase buffer stocks is a political motive for a government increasingly insecure about its popularity. Still, the hunger and food security issues dwarfs politics.

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