El Niño victims get jobs in food-for-work
KIDAPAWAN CITY—The city government will tap indigent families suffering from the effects of the El Niño phenomenon to put them to work for the city’s different campaigns like the antidengue fever drive.
Mayor Joseph Evangelista said on Thursday that heads of indigent families would be tapped to further strengthen the antidengue, rat tail and antiblack bug campaigns, as well as the cleanup of waterways and dikes. In exchange for their work, they will be given food, he said.
Evangelista said each indigent family would be given 13 kilograms of rice under the El Niño calamity intervention program.
At least 11,000 families, which represent 25 percent of the city’s total population, have been directly hurt by the dry spell and some of them are already running out of food.
In Barangay Onica here, for example, the scarcity of food is forcing some residents to seek work in nearby areas so they could buy food for their families, village chair Gasmabel Suelan said.
“Of the 420 heads of families, at least 300 had left to find work in the city or in nearby towns,” Suelan said.
Sixty-five-year-old Mila Pablito said she has been taking care of her three grandchildren since their parents left to find work weeks ago as their farm had dried up.
“They would return to our village every weekend with rice and some vegetables for our consumption,” Pablito said.
Psalmer Bernalte, head of the City Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council (CDRRMC), said the dry spell is hurting the livelihood of farm tenants, small producers and farm workers.
Bernalte said based on data gathered by the council, a total of 266 hectares of agricultural crops such as banana, rice, corn, vegetables and high-value crops had wilted due to the extreme weather condition.
At least 553 farmers suffered losses because of the drought, according to the city agriculture office.
The damage was placed at P30 million.
On Tuesday, the city council declared a state of calamity in the city.
Evangelista said this would enable the city government to use the 30-percent quick response fund (QRF) amounting to P4.5 million to provide assistance to the communities suffering from the effects of El Niño and for the food-for-work program.
In Davao del Sur province, the Department of Agriculture (DA) in Southern Mindanao reported that an aerial survey recently conducted revealed that at least 9,000 hectares of rice land had been parched by the dry spell.
Remelyn Ricoter, DA regional director, said this translates to about 51,000 metric tons of rice lost to the dry spell. Williamor Magbanua with a report from Orlando Dinoy, Inquirer Mindanao
