Politics, economics, rice
The production, consumption, and importation of food (rice or grains) have posed contentious as well as analytically difficult issues even when economics was still in its infancy. In the early 1800s, David Ricardo came up with the idea of comparative advantage to explain why countries trade. On its face, it presented a paradox because comparative advantage suggested that a poor country (one endowed with limited technology) should export a good such as rice even if it didn’t have an absolute advantage in its production (it just needed to have a comparative advantage). Ricardo was also not one to advocate self-sufficiency as he was pretty much a proponent of free international trade. Today’s debate on the merits of rice tariffication presents conundrums and even unanswered questions, though the latter have perhaps more to do with politics than economics.
But even earlier, when economics was not yet a social science, kings and despots already knew that to survive insurrections, they made sure that the price of bread or grain (or any food staple) was affordable to the masses. The Roman poet (Juvenal) considered on or around 100 AD that political stability required whoever was in power to provide bread, as well as circuses! Forget the Romans. The Bible has its share of stories where kings had the burden of protecting their subjects from suffering in times of famine. Closer to home here in the Philippines, when the price of rice spiked in 2018 and became part of an inflation scare, there was a fair amount of wrangling on what to do.
The conventional wisdom today in economics, particularly in the textbooks on international economics, hasn’t changed much in the last two hundred years. Free trade, because it is voluntary and anchored on the concept of comparative advantage, was (and still is) a good thing. And yet, here we are in today’s age of wondrous innovations dubbed as the “fourth” industrial revolution, fulminating at the specter of rice prices remaining high for the consumer but falling to penury-inducing levels for rice farmers. What has gone wrong?