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.

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.”