Gardening in the Philippines in WW II

There was an English-language newspaper called The Tribune which was publishing before WW II, and then kept publishing even after the Philipines fell to the Japanese, although obviously its content changed. This is an article from January 26, 1942.  The Japanese first bombed the Philippines on December 8, 1941 and they occupied Manila on January 2, 1942. According to this article, there was a government agency called the bureau of plant industry which started encouraging people to grow their own vegetables as soon as hostilities began, and here on January 26th, just six weeks later, “almost all of the empty yards in the city [have] disappeared” and “have developed into luxurious gardens of edible greens.”