Bohol was gorgeous, though.

Yep, Panglao, the Chocolate Hills, had a friend who wanted to move there to farm, and I knew an expat that farmed rice in the NorthEast part. Lost his crop in La Nina. The Philippines has a world class Rice Institute and I tt them about Golden Rice. They took the vitamin part from corn and stuck it into rice and it worked, but people wouldn't accept it, GMO. I made friends with a mushroom farmer and tried to get my wife interested. No go, wife is only interested in succulents and a few flowers. The problem on Negros, where I was, was that a lot of the land looked fertile but wasn't. Some areas too much clay, etc. It would take some doing to make it into Terra Preta, and then for what market?


While I was there they would issue import shares to rice farmers, manipulators would buy the shares for a pittance, buy rice, not import, drive the price up and sell into the higher price. The government would stock rice for shortage times and bag it as NFA in warehouses. Cheap rice. It would go missing - sold and rebagged as higher priced rice. The government had to overcontrol because there was so much corruption, about 20% of every dollar was in corruption, and inefficient corruption that slowed things down.