Rice consumption in Asia

How much rice do people in Asia consume?

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Europeans are known for consuming a lot of potatoes and we’ve seen that’s true. In Europe potatoes are the most common staple food, in most of Asia, it’s rice. It probably comes as no surprise that the global top 9 of per capita rice consumption consists completely of Asian countries.

But as we can see on this map, rice is not that popular everywhere in Asia. In Central Asia and the Caucasus, rice consumption is quite low. Potato consumption however, is very high in those areas. Central Asian countries are one of the biggest consumers of potatoes.

The highest consumption of rice can be found in Southeast Asia. But the biggest per capita consumer of rice is Bangladesh (268.9 kg). Cambodia (245.5), Laos (233.5) and Vietnam (212.9) are the only other countries where the per capita consumption exceeds 200 kg.

The data for this map comes from the FAO. The data includes any product made of rice, including rice noodles, sake, rice starch, rice flour and other products made of rice. The amount of rice in the dataset concerns the raw (uncooked) weight.