it is the start of the Rice planting season, and I found this video of how locals still plant rice by hand...

.

...after flooding and plowing under the last years's chaff and the weeds, you end up with nice clean mud. 

For the main harvest, you grow Rice Seedlings separately in a box (or buy it from the local rice institute) and then plant them by hand. ,.

 We still plant by hand, although we rent a harvester/thresher to harvest the rice.

. In the future, of course, machines will be planting the rice seedlings also.

 this 2016 video explains why: even though we have high unemployment, younger people simply don't want to work that hard so that they can live in poverty when they can get a job in the city or overseas.

  .

...here is an article in the Inquirer that explains the coming crisis in food in the Philippines:

for example, we import quite a lot of our rice:

“More than 20 countries have made restrictions on the exports of their food products, and the lingering war in Ukraine continues. So there is really a major disruption of the food supply chain...

But the increase in diesel and Fertilizer prices mean it will be more expensive to grow rice, and sometimes you can't find enough fertilizer, so your yield will be lower:

Compounding this is the fact that rice production in the first semester declined by 6 percent, which Dar attributed to the low usage of fertilizer, the cost of which has risen sharply. Figures from the Fertilizer and Pesticide Authority showed the average price of urea, the most commonly used fertilizer, had nearly tripled to about P3,000 a 50-kilo bag from only P1,200 a year ago.

... So no, I have not been exaggerating in my previous posts about the rice farm crisis.

Marcos has a history of supporting farmers, but even he can't stop the crisis snowballing.

Biden, of course, could reverse his green policies that has stopped the oil companies from drilling/refining/transporting oil products, but hey he has to listen to his green masters...

speaking of the Philippines, we expect the left to mount huge demonstrations for the inaugural (they do this all the times) (in the past being a demonstrator paid you 500 pesos plus a meal, but I suspect now it is higher). 

But this suspicion does not bode well for US/Philippine relations: again from the Inqurer:

“That’s part of their playbook. Whoever sits in Malacañang is their enemy because ultimately, all they want is to overthrow the government through violent means to be followed by a socialist revolution,” he said. Incoming chief presidential legal counsel Juan Ponce Enrile had also warned of a “credible” plot to embarrass the incoming administration, supposedly by groups in the country and the United States.

StrategyPage had a long article about this a couple of days ago: it starts with the attempt of getting back all the loot that BBM's father stole 

my favorite part of the article:

 the PCGG has identified over half the stolen billions and recovered about half of that, which comes to $3.5 billion. Less than half of that has actually been returned to the Philippines and some of that was in turn stolen by senior politicians then in power."...

something to remember the next time you hear that the affluent nations need to give money to poor countries, where much of it will be stolen of course but never mind. 

 the rest of the SP article is about China stealing everything in sight in the West Philippine sea. 

 and speaking of china: WTF was this famous restaurant doing in the Paracels?

... 

 I guess they didn't notice that it is monsoon season, where afternoon thunderstorms are common.

Sigh.