OF SUBSTANCE AND SPIRIT

It was the National Irrigation Administration (NIA) that sounded the call last weekend for the public to stop wasting rice for there is a great likelihood of a shortage in the commodity. The threat of El Niño on palay production is more serious than initially thought. Sounding trivial, NIA appealed to rice eaters “that if we cannot consume the entire one cup of rice, we should only order half.” But neither climate change as an existential issue, nor water supply is trivial. The Philippines in recent years has suffered enough the ravages of climate change. We see that in rising sea levels that have been claimed to be three times the global average. Yolanda is just too recent to be swept away to history books. Typhoons continue to assault us in greater frequency, even on Christmas Day. Climate advocates now observe the destruction of natural ecosystems and devastation of what remain of our forests. No less than the Social Weather Stations reported in March 2023 that 93 percent of Filipinos polled in December 2022 have personally experienced the negativity of climate change.  Five years earlier in 2017, some 87 percent felt the impact of climate change. That NIA call should resonate with many of us because even climate awareness has increased from 74 percent to 81 percent. For we are no strangers to climate change in the Philippines. Likewise, water can never be trivial as far as palay and other food production is concerned. The International Rice Research Institute documented that “the current way of growing irrigated rice in most Asian rice farms requires large amounts of water.” In India and the Philippines, for instance, one kilo of rice would need around 3,000 liters of water. More water would be needed for land preparation. True, the President announced as early as late April this year his government’s efforts to mitigate the “looming dry spell” of El Niño. The approach is basically to convert the country’s dependence on water supply from underground water to surface water. To do this, the President created the Water Resources Management Office (WRMO). The Palace thinks this office should be senior to MWSS, Local Water Utilities Administration (LWUA) and the National Water Resource Board (NWRB). Its recommendations should be followed. How this is going to be executed with an office that is still a work in progress in the middle of El Niño is impossible. The next problem with the office is that the premise of its mandate does not conform with what’s on the ground. The President argued that “We have sufficient…there’s enough water in the Philippines, we don’t just use water, we also waste it.” If that’s the case, how does one explain Senator Grace Poe’s admonition of MWSS to be more proactive in avoiding water crisis? And we have one brewing. Some 600,000 Maynilad customers in the west concession zone in Metro Manila stand to suffer water service interruption up to nine hours nightly starting this week. This means that outside Metro Manila, residents of Rizal, Cavite and Bulacan will also be affected. The Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) has admitted that Angat Dam’s water level continues to decline below the minimum operating level of 180 meters. Such an initial outcome should surprise no one because if indeed we have sufficient water supply, all we need to do is either to issue directives and advisories to the public to conserve water or prepare plans. Obviously, the problem is much deeper, and more serious, one that cannot be licked by directives and advisories. Even then, it is only now that orders have been actually issued to speed up the approval — yes, just the approval — of pipe repairs by Maynilad and Manila Water! We don’t find it reassuring that WRMO should realize only now that it needed to conduct spot inspections of office building for “unwarranted use of water, leaks and faulty bathroom fixtures. The WRMO must have under its employ millions of inspectors to do this and advance water conservation. We cannot stress enough that a concrete strategy for mitigating El Niño should be rolled out to the general public. Water is sine quanon to producing rice and other food commodities. And to do something about this prolonged drought is the responsibility of government. Otherwise, we paint ourselves in a corner for another season of food shortage and galloping inflation. A presidential directive to government agencies to prepare for the possible impact of the dry spell, ensure “protocol-based and scientific” long-term solution, and information campaign is hardly game changing. It’s even less than a nudge in today’s context. What we read in the papers and social media are essentially stop-gap: don’t waste water, don’t waste rice. In the middle of the Asian Financial Crisis 1997-1998, we recall that we also struggled against an earlier El Niño. Its likelihood was flagged a couple of years earlier. Monthly advisories on the weather outlook were released. An Inter-Agency Committee for Crisis Water Management and the Presidential Task Force El Niño collaborated on the strategies to be implemented. On looking back, media outfits were involved extensively as the Philippines coped with the dry spell. Severe drought affected 70 percent of the Philippines. Today’s government simply has to build on the past. Earlier episodes of the dry spell have seen drought monitoring and early warning systems already developed, several inter-agency committees or task forces were formed before to assess climate risk and implement climate risk management programs. The WRMO could not be a superior solution to an inter-agency task force that was supposed to have already been reactivated as early as April. We hope against hope that this government could succeed in implementing more robust solutions like adaptation of the so-called alternate wetting and drying method to use less water but with stable productivity level, development of more water systems like irrigation canals, diversion dams and small-scale irrigation projects, cloud-seeding programs, more water-impounding projects and installation of pumps and engine sets in tail-end areas. We dread seeing the institutionalization of the so-called alternative sources of water. We refer to the picture in a daily newspaper the other day showing residents drawing water from a neighborhood well at Barangay Old Capitol Site in Quezon City. This is the age of digital platforms and algorithms, not bricks and mortars.