ACCIONA to gov’t: Irrigation not a ‘free lunch’

‘Water around the world is underpriced in the sense that it does not reflect the true cost of supplying water. It’s free lunch for the rest of the world so somebody is paying for it through taxes.’

Amid the intensifying heat globally, the head of Spain’s utility infrastructure firm ACCIONA advised the government to allow extra fees on industries to encourage conserving water.

“Water around the world is underpriced in the sense that it does not reflect the true cost of supplying water,” ACCIONA chief executive officer José Manuel Entrecanales Domecq told the DAILY TRIBUNE on Friday at a global leadership forum organized by the Makati Business Club.

“It’s free lunch for the rest of the world so somebody is paying for it through taxes,” he added.

Entrecanales said a wheat farm in the Spanish province of Castilla, for example, loses 40 percent of irrigation during the summer where the temperature rises to 40 degrees Celsius or above.

Due to the scarcity of water, he said the Spanish government has started considering recommendations from the private sector to enforce wise use of water through pricing policies.

Pay extra cost

“If you irrigate wheat, you have to pay the extra cost or plant something else that consumes less water,” Entrecanales said.

In the Philippines, the National Irrigation Administration exempts farmers with landholdings of eight hectares or less from paying service fees to the Irrigators Association.

This complies with Republic Act 10969 or the Free Irrigation Service Act that provides subsidies to the irrigators in place of the zero-charge use of water by the select farmers.

It was signed into law by former president Rodrigo Duterte in 2019.

The law provides an operations subsidy of P150 per hectare for wet and dry season and a maintenance subsidy of P1,750 per canal section.

The Department of Agriculture said over 4,500 metric tons of rice has been damaged this year as El Niño heavily strikes over 2,000 hectares of farm land in Western Visayas and Zamboanga.

Tap alternative water sources

Entrecanales said the Marcos administration’s aggressive push for public-private partnerships or PPPs should help the country tap alternative sources of water and use it efficiently, as well.

ACCIONA secured a contract from Manila Water last year to build the East Bay 2 drinking water treatment plant which will process water from the Laguna Lake. This is the company’s third contract in the Philippines.