The rice har­vest is boom­ing in Sene­gal… but no one there wants to eat it. After the food cri­sis of last year, Sene­gal decided to pro­duce more rice. The prob­lem is, the tastes of the pub­lic still pre­fer the rice imported from Asia.

It’s an exam­ple of the public’s pref­er­ence run­ning counter to the efforts to increase local food pro­duc­tion to pro­tect against future food price shocks.

From this AFP arti­cle that we found at Google News, writer Lau­rence Boutreux tries to answer why the Sene­galese pre­fer for­eign rice.

But the Sene­galese, who serve rice with so many meals, said no thanks. Why? That’s where it gets sticky.

Expla­na­tions range from taste to social stand­ing to the legacy of colo­nial­ism. What­ever the rea­son, the gov­ern­ment is now fig­ur­ing out how to pro­mote locally grown rice and hopes to import none of the sta­ple by 2012.

It seems they may have a hard time achiev­ing that goal. Last year, over three quar­ters of the 800,000 tonnes of rice con­sumed by the Sene­galese was imported from Asia.

The impe­tus for change came from the food cri­sis, which had sent prices of imported rice soar­ing. Sene­gal has since been push­ing locally grown rice to rely less on agri­cul­tural imports, but despite good crops, much remains unsold.
…

Accord­ing to the lat­est offi­cial esti­mates — dis­puted by some pro­duc­ers — the rice har­vest will be at 508,481 tonnes for 2009, up 25 per­cent com­pared to 2008.

The fig­ures have prompted a promise from Senegal’s agri­cul­ture min­is­ter that the coun­try “will not import a sin­gle ker­nel of rice in 2012″.

But what if no one eats it?

One expert blamed the prob­lem on the legacy of colonialism.

“It dates back to the coloni­sa­tion,” said Wore Gana Seck, the head of the com­mis­sion for durable devel­op­ment and envi­ron­ment at Senegal’s eco­nomic and social council.

“Before the Sene­galese ate mil­let and sorghum, but the French imposed a mono­cul­ture of peanuts on farm­ers and imported bro­ken rice from their other colony Indochina for the Sene­galese to eat,” she says.