13-B irrigation budget for NCR? Solon sees ‘pork’ in NIA lump sums

Approximately 13.1 billion of the proposed 32.7-billion budget for the National Irrigation Administration (NIA) has been allocated to the National Capital Region (NCR) which does not have even a patch of agricultural land.

Kabataan Party-list Rep. Terry Ridon made this disclosure yesterday as he questioned the 14 percent increase in NIA budget for 2016.

Ridon said officials of the Department of Agriculture and NIA

should explain the highly questionable items in the latter’s proposed budget.

He described the budgetary items as “corruption prone.”

“For one, when you look at the regional distribution of the NIA budget, you can see that the 13.1billion NCR irrigation budget is 7 billion more than the budget allotted for Central Luzon, which is only 6 billion,” he said. “Why does the irrigation budget for NCR trump the budget for the country’s so-called rice granary?”

“We’ve got a bloated irrigation budget, which is almost 30 times higher than its budget of 1 billion in 2014, yet ask our farmers and they will surely lament the huge sum they are paying for irrigation. Why can’t NIA offer free irrigation despite the fact that the agency is literally being inundated with funds? Large-scale corruption may be at fault,” Ridon said.

He stressed that out of the 32.7 billion NIA budget, 2.9 billion can be considered as lump-sum pork, which is prone to abuse and may be spent building “ghost irrigation projects.”

NIA’s 2.9-billion lump sum includes 1.7-billion budget for “small irrigation projects and pump irrigation systems,” 203.5 million for the “Balikatan Sagip Patubig Program,” and 1-billion counterpart fund for two foreign-assisted irrigation projects – Participatory Irrigation Development Project Phase I and the National Irrigation Sector Rehabilitation and Improvement Project.

Ridon said that these items lack details such as the actual place where the irrigation projects will be built. They could be subject to “under-the-table” negotiations, he said.

“It’s a budget that needs postenactment nomination and verification. It’s classic pork,” Ridon said.