and how are the ecology minded bishops helping the rice harvest?

The dirty little secret of farm work:

machines make work easier.

Here Kuya is out harvesting.

In the past, the rice was cut by hand and then taken in bundles to our jeep-thresher to separate the rice from the stem before it was put into sacks for removal to the area where it would be dried.

Now it is easier to rent a thresher harvester to do it.

This is not our farm but it shows an example of using a harvester/thresher in the fields.

and any Green back to nature types who want to make diesel expensive and go back to the good old days; Well, maybe they can spend a day bent over cutting the rice, or threshing it the old fashioned way by pounding it.

Of course we don't bundle the stalks/hay: We let it in the fields and plow it under the mud to rot to fertilize the next harvest. Yes, it produces methane, which is why there has been a move to a drier method of cultivating rice that doesn't require so much flooding. But that means using more fertilizer.

sigh

and we still dry the rice on the roadways or parking lots or tarps, unless it rains and then we need to dry it using a rice drier. Then you need to store it in a dry place until it's time to mill it. We mill it to brown rice, but the shelf life is not as long as white rice.

Farm expenses are skyrocketing, due to the increase in the price of fertilizer and diesel for farm equipment. And that means that six months from now, the price of rice in the big cities will also go up.

Can you say "food riots" children? I was in Liberia where the president raised the price of rice and there was a revolt by the military to remove him. (and this lead to a long nasty civil war). 

so excuse me when the Philippine bishops say they won't invest money into oil/petroleum.

I don't see them wearing a straw hat toiling in the fields in 90 degree weather cutting rice by hand.

Indeed, one of the reasons for mechanizing rice farms is that the land was distributed/bought by the small farmers years ago under land reform: but now these farmers are getting old, and their kids are educated and get jobs in the cities or as OFW often in the Middle East. So we hire workers from other parts of the Philippines to do the work on our fields. There is a limit to how much land you can own, but many returning OFW are buying up farm land and hiring workers too. But it is more cost effective to use machinery to grow rice, so in the last 20 years I have seen the increased mechanization of local farms.

But  what happens when the increase in expenses to grow rice leads to a higher price of rice being sold in the cities? 

There is a large urban poor population. They also are being hit by higher oil prices, not just because food and clothes etc are now more expensive, but because just going to work is becoming more expensive.

The increase in diesel and gasoline is hitting the poor in transportation, and hurting the tricycle and jeepney drivers, who often own their own vehicles and now are facing rising prices; to make things worse, the gov't is pressuring them to get rid of their older vehicles and buy types that are more fuel efficient, which of course they can't afford. .

the increase in LPG means that it is more expensive to cook food: the alternative is polluting wood fires: using wood to cook is a major cause of rural deforestation. 

Yesterday I had to pay 850 pesos for a bottle of LPG for cooking: usually it runs 650, and last month it was 750.

But the real problem is that fertilizer has increased 40 percent and this, plus the higher price of diesel to run both harvesters and the handplow to prepare the field for the next harvest, means we might not make a profit this year.

but that doesn't stop the virtue signaling bishops:

In one of the strongest declarations on climate change to date from the Catholic Church, the bishops of the Philippines have called for the local church to decline any donations with ties to the fossil fuel and extractive industries as part of a full-scale effort to disconnect church finances from the production of coal, oil and gas. The Catholic Bishops' Conference of the Philippines delivered the directive, along with calling for church institutions to press their banks to phase out fossil fuel holdings

and what do they want to replace these things with? No answer of course. Go back walking to work, and using horse carts to deliver goods to the cities.I had to laugh: they illustrated a muddy street flooded by a typhoon in Manila to show the evil of climate change, but  the dirty little secret is that this means a lack of sewers/ drainage system. And parts of Manila were under sea level and not supposed to be built upon. All of this is infrastructure, and one wonders who is in charge: is the problem lack of money, ignorance of civil engineering, or is the money being diverted into someone's pockets?

I agree that the ecological damage has to be stopped, but they want stop entire industries (putting locals out of work and denying cheap local sources of energy to the poor). There is an alternative: Sustainable mining and forestry, and the use of clean LPG instead of polluting coal.

And there is a lot of natural gas under the West Philippine sea that could benefit the Philippine economy.

That last one is (or should be) one of the priorities of the bishops.

Apparently the bishops didn't notice that if they stop the Philippines from developing these resources, guess who will benefit?

From StrategyPage:

The Chinese strategy is to make it difficult for other nations to fish or search for oil and gas in the disputed waters. China will then offer to negotiate, and share the economic benefits. The other nations will probably be offered some fishing rights in waters of the EEZ of each nation neighboring the South China Sea, but China will keep all the oil and gas outside each nation’s territorial waters (22 kilometers from the coast). ... 

An example of this has been the Philippine efforts since 2005 to conduct oil and gas exploration in the Reed Bank area. Reed Bank is considered part of the Spratly Islands and is 230 kilometers off the coast of the Philippines's Palawan Island, which is well within the internationally recognized EEZ (Exclusive Economic Zone)...

Filipino drilling was supposed to start in 2012 but China has blocked all Filipino attempts to exercise those drilling rights. The Chinese are very capitalistic communists and want all they can steal.

Now, if you want to see their heads explode, just mention that Duterte is looking into using nuclear power to supply energy for the Philippines. Even Leni sort of supports it. BongBong is trying to lie low in the discussion because his father built a plant in Bataan that was later mothballed for safety reason. (corruption? shoddy materials? or politics behind the shut down? Probably all three).

 But now South Korea is looking into rehabilitating the plant.

don't ask me. I am old enough to remember when Three Mile Island almost imploded, but didn't (luckily for us, since the Republican governor didn't want to evacuate folks when he was warned of the danger).

But more modern technology has made nuclear power safer... as long as you don't have a 9.0 earthquake plus tsunami as happened in Fukushima.

by the way: If you are wondering why BongBong Marcos is leading in the next election here, the Manila Standard has an article explaining why.

It's the infrastructure stupid. And safety for the ordinary person. And because BongBong is not his father. And don't forget the Smarmatic voting machines, that stole his election to VP and gave it to Leni.

and now there are problems of printing ballots that make some people wondering what is going on.

Don't ask me...I am more worried about local elections: The two clans are running against each other in the elections and we hope no one will get shot this time around.

they signed a peace pact not to kill each other, so hey we're safe 

Sigh.