El Niño’s daunting challenges for govt

The state weather bureau said the latest El Niño episode is “weak,” but it has already destroyed millions of pesos worth of crops. If it will not rain in the next few weeks and water in angat Dam—the main source of drinking water for Metro Manila—falls to a critical level, farms in Bulacan and Pampanga will stop getting irrigation water. Metro Manila households are prioritized over agricultural land whenever El Niño, which causes below normal rainfall, hits the country.

This is not the first time for the Philippines to grapple with the ill effects of a dry spell. One of the worst episodes experienced by the country happened in 1998. Irrigation water stopped flowing to farms, and rainfed areas could not be tilled at all. That year, the Philippines was forced to import more than 2 million metric tons of rice. The country again experienced the effects of El Niño in 2010 and 2015. The episode in 2010 destroyed more than P10 billion worth of crops, with the rice sector registering the biggest loss. Five years after, drought would again wreak havoc on the Philippines and destroy more than P20 billion worth of crops, mostly rice. The destruction caused by El Niño on rice fields made the country one of the top importers of the staple in the last decade. Unfortunately, the occurrence of El Niño in the Philippines has become more frequent in recent years. The dry spell is particularly problematic for the country because rice, the staple food of Filipinos, is a water-loving crop. The rice sector usually bears the brunt of El Niño, and this is evident in the latest damage report released by the Department of Agriculture (DA). Rice accounted for a huge chunk of the P464 million worth of crops damaged by the dry spell. (See “El Niño damage to crops climbs to P460 million,” in the BusinessMirror, March 12, 2019).

One intervention that the government can implement immediately to cushion the ill effects of the dry spell is to set up more small-water impounding systems or SWIPs. These SWIPs are small-scale irrigation systems where water is impounded in a pond and are established in areas that cannot be covered by national irrigation systems. The government tried to set up more SWIPs, but budgetary constraints made it difficult for the DA to do this. There is also the solar-powered irrigation systems (SPIS) that the DA wants to set up to irrigate 500,000 hectares of rice farms. But the availability of government funds is crucial to the DA’s success in attaining its goal. The agency is targeting to construct 6,250 units of SPIS by the end of the President’s term. So far, only 169 have been put up. Other interventions, such as the protection and management of watersheds, require political will to implement. Watersheds are main sources of freshwater, and they provide the major water requirements of several irrigation systems, hydroelectric dams, and domestic and industrial water systems. Unfortunately, timber poaching, illegal logging and quarrying threaten our watersheds. Fighting illegal logging and quarrying should be done with the same resolve exhibited by the government in trying to eliminate the drug menace. The challenges are daunting, but the water problem is remediable. However, the government must act fast if it wants to prevent water shortages in the future and ensure the country’s food security. While it is cheaper to import food, the Philippines cannot just rely on its neighbors in Southeast Asia all the time. This was the lesson of the 2008 rice price crisis, one that the government has yet to heed.