UPDATE: You can view a slideshow of the pictures below. But you’ll still have to actually visit the set to read the text.
Back in June, when I first started taking pictures of the rice crisis in Mindanao, I wasn’t really sure what I wanted to do with them. Since, for the moment, the answer seems to have been “nothing” I thought I’d at least put them all up publicly (Some of the pictures, and most of the text haven’t been up before).
The full set is now up here
There’s quite a bit of explanatory text along with the photos. One of these days, I do still intend to put this all together, but for now time seems hard to come by.
Rice crisis revisited
Portrait from Agdao Market
This is a woman named Lita Midrano, who I spoke to this June, on the day rice prices broke 50 pesos per kilo in Mindanao. Midrano complained the subsidized rice provided by the National Food Authority for p18.50 a kilo was very poor quality, but she still waited in line for hours, because she couldn’t afford not to.
“With rice a reaching 50 pesos per kilo, we’re already getting very angry,” she told me. “But before getting angry and starting a war, we have to eat. And so we wait in line.”
Telling it like it is
This is a quick-and-dirty little slideshow of Lorena Navarro, at Bankerohan Market in Davao City. She used to grow corn, but the price of fertilizer got too high, and her earnings were to low, so like many farmers, she had to leave the provinces and come to the city to look for work.
“It’s become too difficult to make a living, so many people stopped farming corn and rice,” she told me. “Now they just grow bananas and camote. But do you want to eat just bananas and camote? It that what you want? Look at the poor – fighting here, almost killing each other just to buy some cheap rice.”
When the government subsidized rice ran out at the market, she lost her temper, jumped up on a platform and started shouting against the government, accusing President Arroyo and other officials of failing to take care of the people, of corruption, of having bad policies about fertilizer and other agricultural products. “We’re sick of this,” she says. Sick of waiting in line, sick of hunger. As you can see, she found a pretty receptive audience.
Sorry for lack of subtitles, maybe in the future.

