Dry spell stalking Maguindanao, Albay farms

Farmers in Maguindanao province have been suffering from the brunt of a dry spell and complained that their farmlands were getting drier every day.

Maguindanao, one of five provinces in the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM), has not experienced rainfall in the past three weeks, with the sun giving excruciating heat.

In Albay province, disaster officials are bracing for the onset of a dry spell that could trigger power outages, a drop in agricultural production and a rise in heat-related diseases, Gov. Joey Salceda said last week.

The dry spell has slowly inched its way into the province, affecting close to a thousand hectares of rice fields in Daraga, Camalig, and Polangui towns, Salceda said.

Rainfall dependent

Mosa Saligan, a farmer in Datu Odin Sinsuat, Maguindanao, said farmers could not replant rice because the rice fields have remained dry since last month.

In fact, the Liguasan marshland was almost dry, with what used to be the riverbed exposed due to lack of water.

Saligan said most of the rice fields in Maguindanao were not irrigated and depended on rainfall.

“There are some areas that are irrigated but most in the upland [areas] are without irrigation. We rely on rain that we have not experienced in a long time,” said another farmer, Kali Usman, from nearby Upi town, Maguindanao.

Lawyer Makmod Mending, regional secretary of the Department of Agriculture and Fisheries in the ARMM, said his office had sent teams to monitor the state of farmlands in Maguindanao so that action could be taken.

“We expect this to happen, especially [because] summer is just around the corner,” Mending told reporters.

He said he had yet to receive reports from municipal and provincial agriculturists on the situation in their localities.

But he admitted that ordinary people could easily see the drying rice fields that may result in an increase in the prices of rice.

“In anticipation of the effects on agriculture, we are sending teams to various towns and provinces to determine the extent of the drought,” Mending said.

Meanwhile, the Department of Trade and Industry in the ARMM is closely monitoring the prices of rice in the market. Mending said the effect of the dry spell on the prices of agricultural products could take two to three months before it is felt by the buying public.

Albay

Quoting a provincial agriculture service (PAS) report, Salceda said the dry spell had so far affected some 996 hectares of rain-fed rice land in Daraga (700 ha), followed by Camalig (196 ha) and Polangui (100 ha).

The governor said he had convened the Provincial Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council to immediately prepare urgent countermeasures to cushion the negative impact of the dry spell on agriculture, health and sanitation, and power.

Since the beginning of this year, rainfall has been “way below normal,” he said, quoting an advisory from the Philippine Atmospheric, Geophysical and Astronomical Services Administration (Pagasa).

This was confirmed by Lilian Guillermo, Pagasa officer in charge here, who said that in January, the actual rainfall in Albay was

114.3 milliliters, or less than half of the 311.7-mm normal threshold for this particular month.

In February, the rainfall was also way below normal, with only 47.8 mm versus the 236.4-mm normal rainfall projected in the province for the month.

She explained that one criteria in declaring a dry spell was three consecutive months of below normal rainfall, which would mean that they would need to wait until the end of March to determine if a dry spell has already been experienced in the province.

The normal rainfall for March in Albay is 193.8 mm but with the experience of the past two months, the usual “above normal” reading of rainfall in the province would be revised to “below normal,” she said.

Ernesto de la Torre, provincial agricultural officer, said in a phone interview last week that the production loss brought by the lack of rainfall in the last two months was placed at 2,490 metric tons, equivalent to P23 million.

However, he said the damage was only three to five percent of the agricultural output of the total 25,400 ha of rice lands in the province.

Irrigation

The dry spell concern was compounded by an irrigation system problem because Agos-Sta. Cruz Dam in Polangui was not operational and needed repair, said Cristina Mesias, provincial chief of the National Irrigation Administration.

Mesias said the irrigation dam served water to 160 ha of irrigated rice lands in Polangui.

She said it would need about P80 million to repair the dam but that the fund was not available this year.

As a countermeasure, Salceda said the PAS would provide seed assistance to affected farmers, propose to farmers alternative crops to be planted, repair and maintain shallow tube wells, and provide fuel assistance to farmers with irrigation pumps.

Salceda also raised the concern that the dry spell may bring power outages, which would immensely affect business and trigger spikes in the prices of basic commodities.

He explained that power outages on a nationwide scale would occur during the dry spell because some of the hydro-powered power plants would stop operations due to lack of water supply.

In 2010, a dry spell destroyed 6,000 ha of agricultural lands in the six towns and two cities of Albay, forcing disaster authorities to place the entire province under a state of calamity. Edwin O. Fernandez, Inquirer Mindanao, and Mar S. Arguelles, Inquirer Southern Luzon