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
October 8, 2008 By Leave a Comment
Portrait from Agdao Market
August 19, 2008 By Leave a Comment
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.
She was angry, and along with other mothers and grandmothers in line — women old enough to have lived through decades of war in Mindanao — she started talking, half joking and half serious about rioting and revolution. How high, I asked, would the price have to get?
“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
June 8, 2008 By Leave a Comment
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.
Rice Crisis in Davao
June 6, 2008 By Leave a Comment
Women buying government subsidized rice at Bankerohan market in Davao City.
A laborer loads 50 kilo sacks of government subsidized rice at the National Food Authority warehouse in Davao City