Agriculture Secretary Domingo Panganiban likes to see more white corn than rice on the dining tables of Filipino families.
"In place of feeding and fattening livestock with corn and eating them, we should be eating the corn ourselves. That will make us healthier," he said.
Panganiban, a career agriculturist, has expounded on the health benefits of adopting white corn as a staple instead of rice during a dialogue with farmers in northern Pampanga .
He said this would also ease the pressure on government agencies to import rice from other countries.
Despite being an agricultural country and a former rice exporter, the Philippines has been heavily dependent on foreign countries such as Vietnam and China, for its rice requirements. Panganiban asked Filipinos to take another "enlightened look" at corn as he observed that rice consumption in the traditionally corn-eating regions of the Visayas and Mindanao, had been increasing in recent years.
CEBU
200,000 tonnes of rice consumed daily
Agriculture Secretary Domingo Panganiban reported that the average consumption of corn by Cebuanos [in Central Philippines] is one kilo per day.
"Because of the shift, they now consume two kilos of rice. So if there are 10 million corn-eating Cebuanos, we are talking here of 20 million kilos of rice or 200,000 metric tonnes of rice daily," he said. Corn was planted only in 120,000 hectares last year he added.
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