Magistrates in Harwich, Essex, confiscated £725,000 in cash after Jai Benie, 37, a rice importer, failed to answer bail on £1.3m fraud charges.

However, the country is also the world's largest rice importer in 2010.

Plans for the creation of OREC were denounced in the Philippines, the world's biggest rice importer.

In the 1970s, Indonesia was a major rice importer, but by 1985 self-sufficiency had been achieved after six years of annual growth rates in excess of 7 percent per year.

Once the world's largest rice importer, Indonesia is now self-sufficient in rice, the dietary staple, and its population growth has been curbed sharply.

Today, the world's leading rice exporter, by the early 1980s Vietnam was a rice importer.

The Philippines, the nation in which high-volume "miracle rice" was developed, is now a rice importer.

The nation, a onetime rice importer, transformed itself into the world's second largest rice exporter and a player in the global coffee trade.

Senegal is the second largest rice importer in Africa, ahead of Côte d'Ivoire and behind Nigeria.

You can see this in the large amounts consumed (the Philippines is the second largest rice importer in the world).