Plant more rice!
Well, I wish it were as simple as this cross stitch project that I made especially for my parents, to hang in their living room. Planting rice is very special to our family because it was planting rice that sent me and my four siblings to school. All of us, in fact, have actually planted rice in rice paddies.
We used to live in a little cottage like this...
...surrounded by banana trees and rice fields. Except that our cottage was colored white with a red door. And later on the rice fields gave way to sugar cane. The banana trees still stand to this day, though, a testament to the great love affair Visayans have with bananas.
So I asked my father, who for me is an expert when it comes to farming, for he is a farmer first hand, how come there is a rice crisis today/how come we are importing rice when we are an agricultural country?
His answers were simple: 1) there are more people today and our rice production has not caught up with the demand; 2) there are intricacies inherent in rice production (water irrigation, weeding, fertilizing, pest control, harvesting, drying, milling, storing) that make the cost of production prohibitive; 3) it is actually more lucrative for planters to cultivate sugar cane farms than rice farms and 4) many farm laborers have poor work philosophies and attitudes.
There are so much more that I want to say. But it is getting late so perhaps I will continue tomorrow… or some other time… I hope it’s going to be tomorrow.
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I forgot to get the exact dimensions of this piece, it's around 2 feet by 2.5 feet. This is one of the easiest cross stitch projects I made. It took me maybe 2-3 months to stitch. And that's because there were plenty of breaks in between stitching sessions. Maybe if I sat down to it 8 - 12 hours a day, I can probably finish one piece like this in one or two days. (Yabang)
Notice that there are a lot of white spaces. This means that even if the canvass is big, my actual work is not so intense because the images are simple in pattern and color. And also, there are actually few images to be stitched here.
2 comments:
you are absolutely right in saying that the answer to the rice crisis is plant more rice... instead of importing it.
wag nga lang nanakawin ang pondo para sa fertilizer!
Oh, Abner, there are more horrible and shocking things I have discovered about this rice crisis thing in our country. I want to write about that one day soon. Grabe talaga. I can't seem to get myself to write about it yet kasi nakakabaliktad ng sikmura.
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