No substitutes for rice?

Question

rice is inelastic am i right. why is it that some say there are no substitutes for rice because i thought that rice is a carbohydrate and can be substituted with noodles.. etc.. is it because of its nutritional content?

please enlighten me. i'm new to economics.

Answer 1

There is no substitute in terms of the food people actually  have.  

World stockpiles of wheat and other grains are now at historically low levels.  And if there isn't enough rice for everyone.  Then there also isn't enough wheat to make up for the shortfall in rice.

You can't increase wheat consumption, when people don't have any additional wheat.

Answer 2

Rice is a staple of near three quarters of the people . To replace that with another product would take a lot of time and money . Which when people are starving is not piratical . Not to mention the culture barriers to accepting another food product .

Answer 3

Rice is inelastic for cultural reasons, among others.  Some cultures, notably southern China & SE Asia, the entire cuisine is built around rice.  They can get 3 crops a year there and cannot grow wheat, so the entire culture and cuisine has revolved around what the locality can grow.

Of course, you can only get some maximum amount of rice per year from an amount of land under optimal weather and other conditions -- and optimal never really happens.  But you can never get more than the max until there is some major impact into the equation.  Inelasticity.

There are differences in the nutritional content, glycemic index, etc. from one carb to another.  Another limit to substitutions/interchangeability.

Transport and shipping is another factor.  Locally grown requires less fuel for transportation.  At what point does shipping/storage cause so much spoilage or cost so much that it is not cost-effective.  

And if you are short of rice, what are you going to replace it with?  We're short of wheat, corn, sorghum, and every other kind of grain.  We're short of animal feed and therefore we are short of meat.  The oceans are overfished, and we're short of fish and seafood.  Somebody(ies) contaminated the tomato fields with their salmonella-infested poo and now we're short of tomatoes.  And the Midwest floods just wiped out the second-largest organic vegetable farming region in the US, so we're short of veggies and salad ingredients.

Inelasticity comes from an incredible range of factors.

Answer 4

Rice used to be a luxury and they replaced it with mullet or other types of fish.  Nowadays it's inelastic because if the price changes people still demand the same quantity of it.  Noodles aren't a good substitute because many of them are made from rice.