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Step inside Azim Popat’s small shop on Gerrard St. E., and you’ll see every kind of basmati rice, from the finest polished grain to the cheaper, lower-grade kernels, proudly displayed and piled in 4.5-kilogram bags.

For now, the shelves are stocked at Kohinoor, the East Indian grocery Popat has owned for nearly two decades. But already the shop owner sees signs that the growing international rice crisis may be making its way to Toronto.

The store no longer carries Sona Masuri, a premium medium-grain rice prized by the Indian community, since India stopped exporting it last year. And it’s only through personal connections with suppliers that Popat has secured his usual stock of basmati.

Basmati is the store’s best-selling item, Popat said.

"It’s not about price any more. It’s about availability," he said, noting that some customers are buying up to four times as much rice in case of a shortage.

In neighbourhood groceries and massive Asian superstores throughout the GTA, there’s some small-scale rice-hoarding going on, spurred by tales of shortages and rationing worldwide. Some stores, following the step taken by U.S. warehouse outlet Sam’s Club, have imposed caps on how much rice customers can buy.

But while it may be hard to find your favourite brand or type of rice, so far, there’s still plenty of the white stuff to go around.

At Hong Tai Supermarket, an Asian megamart in Scarborough, the soaring cost of rice hasn’t deterred customers from stockpiling eight-kilogram bags of a Thai variety considered among the best.

"We keep telling them, `two bags per family,’ but then they just come back every day and buy two bags," said store manager Ann Luong, adding that a typical family goes through one bag every two weeks.

The store set the two-bag limit a month ago after it was cut off by its supplier, she said.

"After what’s on the shelf, I don’t have any," said Luong, who estimates the bags will be gone before the weekend is through. "How soon will we get it? I don’t know."

Though there are other varieties of rice in stock, she said, customers are attached to that particular brand and won’t necessarily settle for anything else.

But their irritation at switching brands pales in comparison to the drama of a true shortage, she said.

"If we can’t get rice, I don’t don’t know what we’ll do," Luong said payday loans. "Our people, we have to eat rice. If we can’t have rice, people get angry."

There’s plenty of talk about a rice shortage at Philippine Oriental Food Market, just a few blocks from Kohinoor. But it’s not their own supply the customers worry about. It’s that of their families on the other side of the world.

"Where I’ve seen an increase in business is from people sending money to their relatives in the Philippines so they can buy rice," said Rosita Dela Cruz, the store’s owner. She said some people have been wiring twice as much cash as they normally would.

In Toronto, Dela Cruz said, demand for rice has held steady, but her store hasn’t seen any cases of hoarding. Nor is it having trouble getting rice from suppliers.

"We’ve not seen a panic yet."

Premier Dalton McGuinty said yesterday his government will "monitor the situation very carefully," but Ontario’s poorest people shouldn’t expect extra help with spiralling food and energy prices for now.

Speaking at the Green Living Show in Toronto, the Premier said his government has a "great plan" to attack poverty and guide the province through an economic slowdown, including a pledge to increase welfare rates about 2 per cent.

But some critics said that was not enough. "People on seriously inadequate incomes are going to continue to suffer," said anti-poverty activist Jacquie Maund of Campaign 2000, calling for welfare rates to be indexed to inflation.

With a file from Rob Ferguson

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