Cambodia's royal cows performed an ancient ceremony yesterday, predicting the country would have a "quite good" rice harvest this year, despite global concerns over supplies of the grain.
Cambodian King Norodom Sihamoni presided over the country’s Royal Plowing ceremony in a park outside the royal palace. Thousands of people watched on as royal astrologers observed what the cows ate to signal the coming year’s harvests.
After a symbolic plowing of a portion of the park’s field, a pair of royal cows were led to seven dishes — rice, corn, beans, sesame, grass, water and alcohol — laid out on trays.
PHOTO:AFP
“Based on what the royal cows ate, the rice harvest will be quite good,” chief astrologer Kang Ken declared before the crowd of onlookers.
He also said the corn harvest would be good, but the bean crop would be average.
The traditional ceremony marks the start of the planting season in the kingdom.
Farmers who joined the ceremony hailed the prediction.
“This means that we will not face rice shortages in the coming year,” said 58-year-old Kao Tob, a rice farmer in Kampong Chhnang, some 90km northwest of Phnom Penh.
Even if the harvest is strong, Cambodians face soaring food prices. Inflation reached double digits late last year and now hovers around 11 percent.
Good-grade rice — Cambodia’s staple food — has nearly doubled in price this year.
Rice now costs nearly US$0.90 per kilogram, deepening the poverty of the one-third of the population who live on less than US$0.50 a day.
World rice prices have soared this year, a trend blamed on higher energy and fertilizer costs, greater global demand, droughts, the loss of rice farmland to biofuel plantations and price speculation.
The Philippines yesterday said its coast guard would acquire 40 fast patrol craft from France, with plans to deploy some of them in disputed areas of the South China Sea. The deal is the “largest so far single purchase” in Manila’s ongoing effort to modernize its coast guard, with deliveries set to start in four years, Philippine Coast Guard Commandant Admiral Ronnie Gil Gavan told a news conference. He declined to provide specifications for the vessels, which Manila said would cost 25.8 billion pesos (US$440 million), to be funded by development aid from the French government. He said some of the vessels would
CARGO PLANE VECTOR: Officials said they believe that attacks involving incendiary devices on planes was the work of Russia’s military intelligence agency the GRU Western security officials suspect Russian intelligence was behind a plot to put incendiary devices in packages on cargo planes headed to North America, including one that caught fire at a courier hub in Germany and another that ignited in a warehouse in England. Poland last month said that it had arrested four people suspected to be linked to a foreign intelligence operation that carried out sabotage and was searching for two others. Lithuania’s prosecutor general Nida Grunskiene on Tuesday said that there were an unspecified number of people detained in several countries, offering no elaboration. The events come as Western officials say
A plane bringing Israeli soccer supporters home from Amsterdam landed at Israel’s Ben Gurion airport on Friday after a night of violence that Israeli and Dutch officials condemned as “anti-Semitic.” Dutch police said 62 arrests were made in connection with the violence, which erupted after a UEFA Europa League soccer tie between Amsterdam club Ajax and Maccabi Tel Aviv. Israeli flag carrier El Al said it was sending six planes to the Netherlands to bring the fans home, after the first flight carrying evacuees landed on Friday afternoon, the Israeli Airports Authority said. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also ordered
Former US House of Representatives speaker Nancy Pelosi said if US President Joe Biden had ended his re-election bid sooner, the Democratic Party could have held a competitive nominating process to choose his replacement. “Had the president gotten out sooner, there may have been other candidates in the race,” Pelosi said in an interview on Thursday published by the New York Times the next day. “The anticipation was that, if the president were to step aside, that there would be an open primary,” she said. Pelosi said she thought the Democratic candidate, US Vice President Kamala Harris, “would have done