Public stockpiling of rice in Asia Pacific

The public stockpiling of staple grains is one of the earliest strategies used to mitigate food supply instability. After many millennia, it remains an important aspect, if not the cornerstone of many national food policies around the world. In the case of the Asia Pacific region this essentially translates to stockpiling and building up rice reserves.Several objectives can be met through successful public stockpiling policies. Some of these include:<ul style="color: #424952; font-family: Arial, Geneva, Helvetica, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12.928px;"><li>Stability of food supply and physical access to food (during emergencies and/or otherwise)</li><li>market price stabilisation and assured access to affordable food</li><li>increased incomes for farmers in agricultural economies so as to incentivise greater production</li></ul>Most of the benefits of public stockpiling are short-term. They can be extremely useful stop-gap measures in ensuring food economy stability and are thus a useful buffer to have in a government’s arsenal of food security policies. There are however numerous negative (both real and potential) implications to pursuing policies of public stockpiling. These implications are caused by a number of factors. Firstly, there are no set norms or directives on how a public stockpiling program me ought to work, what the optimal levels are or how they are to be calculated. Secondly, stockpiling policies are often used to fulfil multiple objectives and because of this, some objectives may result in activities which conflict with other objectives. These points are explored in greater detail in the main text of the report.