CHAPTER 10
Thai Quality
In the rice paddies near Ayutthaya, a former Siamese capital that seventeenth-century emissaries of Louis XIV compared with Paris for its wealth and importance, Payao Ruangpueng is worried about insects.
Specifically, she's worried about an infestation of rice plant hoppers, slow-walking herbivores that munch their way through fields and devastate production. The hopper burn enveloping Payao's land may cut the 40-year-old farmer's crop yields by more than half.
Holding hopper-heavy grasses in her hands, she laments the brown bugs that become dozens of bumps on her rice grasses, ignore her pesticides, and stymie her best efforts at eradication. They might ruin the second of her three harvests this year.
“We can't grow other ...
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