A technology developed by a university that monitors crop production data can be utilized in formulating policy recommendations on inflation, the National Economic and Development Authority said.

The Project SARAI, or the Smarter Approaches to Reinvigorate Agriculture as an Industry in the Philippines, was developed by the University of the Philippines Los Baños where it implements a real-time monitoring of production areas through remotely-sensed images.

It provides crop advisories for nine commodities: rice, corn, banana, coconut, coffee, cacao, sugarcane, soybean, and tomato.

In particular, these advisories include local weather data and drought forecasts with farm management activities, such as nutrient and water management. It also monitors proactive pests and diseases on the crops.

“During the SARAI technology orientation, one distinct advantage is that it can be deployed at the community level, allowing agriculturists and farmers to easily apply it themselves,” said Rory Jay S.C. Dacumos, an official from NEDA’s Agriculture, Natural Resources, and Environment

The project provides a mobile application, Bantay SARAI, which allows farmers to report their crop planting date, expected harvest date, anticipated yield, and damages.

“In addition to SARAI's unique community-level deployment capability, its most significant feature is the cost-free capture of satellite images through the Google Earth Engine,” the NEDA official said.

“These images are then plotted in the Quantum Geographic Information System (QGIS) at no additional cost,” he further said.

The tool is currently being assessed to support the policy decisions of the NEDA-chaired Inter-Agency Committee on Inflation and Market Outlook, which provides advice to manage inflation.

“We thank the UPLB-SARAI team, led by Dr. Victoria Maria Espaldon, for their assistance in providing valuable information to NEDA. This information will be used to craft anticipatory policy recommendations for managing food inflation,” Dacumos said.