Seeking to mitigate the impact of El Niño phenomenon on farmers, the Department of Agriculture (DA) said it will implement rice farming strategies that utilizes less water.
DA Assistant Secretary for Operations U-Nichols Manalo identified the farming strategies as "Alternate Wetting and Drying" which uses less water for farming, and "Quick Turn Around" or QTA which allows immediate rice replanting right after harvest.
"AWD is a water-saving technology that rice farmers can apply to reduce their water use in irrigated fields," Manalo said during Task Force El Niño’s meeting on Feb. 12.
Meanwhile, he said, “QTA is a strategy wherein all rice farms after harvest shall quickly replant immediately without waiting for the months of the succeeding planting season to begin.”
Almost one million farmers have been contacted by the DA to install the water-saving technology in about 15,000 hectares of rice areas, according to Manalo.
Farmers have already started replanting in over 5,500 hectares of rice fields, the agriculture department said.
The DA seeks to implement the quick-turn-around strategy in more than 26,000 hectares.
Such measures, the agency said, were implemented in compliance with President Marcos’ Executive Order (EO) No. 53 which orders the government to streamline, reactivate, and reconstitute the old El Niño task forces under EO No. 16 (s. 2001) and Memorandum Order No. 38 (s. 2019). The EO was signed by the President last Jan. 19.
The aforementioned Executive Order mandates that the task group create a thorough plan for El Niño and La Niña readiness and recovery, with the goal of offering “systematic, holistic, and results-driven interventions” to help the public deal with and lessen their potentially catastrophic impacts.
The Chief Executive designated Defense Secretary Gilberto Teodoro Jr. as the task force chairperson, while Science and Technology Secretary Renato U. Solidum was designated as co-chairperson.
On Jan. 26, Agriculture spokesperson Assistant Secretary Arnel de Mesa said they are hopeful that the country's agricultural sector can still produce 20 million metric tons (MT) of palay this year.
The agriculture department is banking on government measures to mitigate the impact of El Niño.
De Mesa said DA’s primary water management interventions include distributions of small-scale irrigation projects and solar irrigation systems to areas in the tail-end of the irrigation systems and other areas having difficulty accessing water.
As such, he said that the agriculture department is conducting information dissemination in El Niño affected areas.
As of Feb. 8, the DA said the damage and losses caused by El Nino in Western Visayas and Zamboanga Peninsula has reached P151.3 million. Nearly 4,000 farmers in the said areas have been affected by the phenomenon.
“Most of the damage and losses were incurred on rice and corn that are on their reproductive stage,” the agency stated.
With this, the agency said it distributed vegetable seeds in Western Visayas. For affected farmers in Zamboanga Peninsula, the DA said it procured planting materials for high value crops that need less water.
“These actions, which cost over P1 million, are on top of the DA’s cloud seeding operations, pest control management, and promotion of wider use of drought-resistance crop varieties to help regions experiencing water shortage,” the agriculture department noted.