In Cordillera, water becomes source of feuds

Atok, Benguet—Farmers in Bontoc, Mt. Province, began the summer by planting rice in their stonewalled terraces in April, much earlier than usual.

This is because unresolved boundary disputes over water have forced some villages to manage their irrigation needs better by taking turns planting to stretch supply until the rains come.

Households in many parts of the country are barely aware of how water sometimes becomes a reason for conflicts. Unusual weather patterns have altered the rainy months in the Cordillera, leaving dry some communities that follow a traditional rice planting cycle, government data showed.

But the example of Cordillera farming communities express how any neighborhood can quickly adapt to a new environment fraught with weather that has become unpredictable, according to a climate change initiative of the University of the Philippines (UP) Baguio.

Since April, Mayors Gregorio Abalos Jr. (La Trinidad), Florencio Bentrez (Tuba) and Ruben Paoad (Tublay), all of Benguet, have been talking and exchanging insights as to how best to address their problems because of urbanization, population growth and an erratic weather.

They joined a set of stakeholders’ workshops organized recently by the UP Cordillera Studies Center (CSC) for the five Benguet towns that surround the summer capital.

The UP center has embarked on a climate change program which aims to develop a database of weather data and technology to help guide government officials.

Reuben Andrew Muni, a UP Baguio sociology lecturer, and Maileenita Peñalba, a political science lecturer, said the initiative decided to focus first on a proposed resource-sharing group called BLISTT. The acronym stands for Baguio City, and the Benguet towns of La Trinidad, Itogon, Sablan, Tuba and Tublay.

Muni and Peñalba presented to the BLISTT mayors an outline of common issues about potential water conflicts and provided insights as to how practical water-sharing initiatives may help solve these problems.

Reservations

Abalos said many of the BLISTT towns expressed reservations about “sharing” because of fears they would lose out to highly urbanized Baguio with its high consumption needs.

The discomfort about sharing “have taken a political tone,” which would discourage the average policymaker, Muni said.

In Sablan, for example, officials who supported a proposal to build an ecological landfill for Baguio were not reelected in 2010.

Baguio’s problems have also affected its neighbors. Its only dump has been shut down but garbage left there threatens to bury a village in Tuba, while pollution along its creeks always finds its way down the Balili River in La Trinidad.

Baguio is also seeking new water sources but plans by a mining firm to supply it with water have been derailed by legal problems and objections from communities in Itogon, a mining town.

The Baguio Water District (BWD) projects demand in Baguio to reach 66,871 cubic meters of water each daily by 2012, when all it can supply is 65,000 cubic meters, said Salvador Reodica, BWD assistant general manager.

In May, however, Peñalba said they found case studies of arising water problems for communities where water used to be abundant.

Tublay’s town proper also suffers from water shortages. Like Baguio, water delivery trucks service households in that town to augment their daily supply.

What UP Baguio provides on the table is the science behind the erratic weather, and the numbers still indicate that Baguio and its neighbors also receive some of the highest recorded volume of rainfall, which should negate their water supply problems, Muni said.

On July 15, Abalos and government engineers inspected the Balili River, which flows down to La Trinidad from Baguio. The waterway has been classified as “biologically dead” due to pollution discharged into it.

Abalos hoped to reactivate a joint task force representing his town and the summer capital that was put up in the 1980s to rehabilitate the river.