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human
ELI5: Why is rice so readily available and cheap?

I've traveled around Southeastern Asia a bit and seen rice paddies first hand, as well as have read a bit about how difficult life is for rice farmers. It seems to be incredibly labor intensive and somewhat low yielding, so I don't get why 1) there seems to be so much of it really available, and 2) it is such a cheap crop. Can someone ELI5?
gpt
I am going to look at this from a smallholder/ traditional farmer point of view
It does appear to be incredibly labour intensive, but rice comes with one incredible advantage, you can flood the fields and plant the rice plants in the mud, and the rice will grow for the first few weeks of its life in the water, so while planting and harvesting looks backbreaking, apart from that you have 3 months or more where you just need to control the water flow.
This means no plowing, no digging, and more importantly no constant weeding or bug patrol for the farmers, it also means that they don't need tractors or teams of oxen, or to spend money on weedkillers and pesticides.