MY fondest memories of the newly-minted South Luzon Expressway — the highway addition to the Manila South Diversion Road (MSDR) starting at Muntinlupa all the way to Canlubang — are of rice paddies left and right.
Rice paddies that began as muddy fields being prepared for planting, slowly turning green as the months progressed and turning golden when harvest season neared. As a city lad, I loved looking out the window of the BLTB buses and seeing the rice stalks from which the all valuable palay were harvested. I could then relate the rice paddies and rice stalks to the rice grains my dad would buy in Cubao.
Buying rice was always an experience for me — the way the dealer would take out his wooden squarish box, fill it with rice, even off the top, pour the rice into small brown bags, and seal them with tape that needed to be moistened over a wet sponge. Depending on how many gantas of rice Dad would buy, we would be carrying those brown bags of rice from the dealer all the way home.
‘… this transformation — the conversion of agricultural land into prime real estate — has been happening all over the country where new road networks were opening up previously inaccessible areas to new opportunities.’
Then we would even spend some time removing the stones before the uncooked rice would be poured onto a rice cooker!
Those rice fields are long gone. The creation of the SLEX changed the environment literally and figuratively, turning the rice fields into valuable commercial and industrial real estate that soon gave way to subdivisions and even factories we see today. Fewer rice fields from which to harvest our daily requirements.
And this transformation — the conversion of agricultural land into prime real estate — has been happening all over the country where new road networks were opening up previously inaccessible areas to new opportunities.
Couple that with another development, one that the late Ka Luis Taruc pointed out in the mid-1990s: farmers could not convince their children to follow in their footsteps. So, as farmers died away, no one stepped up to take their places and their “heirs” were happy to dispose of whatever rice fields they had to eager real estate developers.
Put these two together: new roads turning agricultural land into prime commercial and industrial property plus farmers’ children preferring to sell what little landholdings they have rather than becoming farmers themselves — and what do you get?
You get Cielo Magno being told that her term had “expired” while rice prices remain far from the P20 that was promised!
Oh well.
Let them eat rice — if they could afford to buy rice in the first place!
