Agriculture Secretary Emmanuel Piñol said on February 3 that the Department of Agriculture would promote the establishment of solar-powered irrigation system as an answer to the lack of irrigation for most of the country’s 3.9-million hectares of rice lands.
Piñol said the DA plans to ask Congress to allocate P20 billion starting next year to distribute solar-powered irrigation systems each of which could pump from 400 to 1,000 gallons of water a day for up to 150 hectares of rice farm.
He noted that of the 3.9 million hectares of rice farms in the country, only 1.2 million hectares benefit from communal irrigation systems that allow farmers to plant rice twice a year.
The rest of the 2.7 million hectares of rice lands are rain-fed only, and farmers there could plant rice only once a year, he said.
“The Philippines is blessed with so many rivers, tributaries, lakes and almost six months of rain, not to mention typhoons which bring rain and even floods, every year. Yet, 120 years after the Department of Agriculture was created in 1898, the country only has 1.2-million hectares of rice fields currently serviced by irrigation systems,” Piñol lamented in a Facebook post.
He said this serious lack of irrigation is the main reason the country is lagging in rice production compared to the growing consumption of rice by the country’s growing population.
“To achieve sufficient rice supply for the country, at least one million hectares of the 2.7-million hectares of rain-fed areas must be irrigated for farmers to be able to plant twice a year, which would mean an additional harvest of 3.9-million metric tons,” Piñol said.
When milled with a recovery rate of 65%, the one million hectares of previously rain-fed areas could bring in an additional production of 2.9-million metric tons of rice, the DA Secretary noted.
“That (2.9-million metric tons of rice) is over and above the (current) annual rice shortage of 1.8-million metric tons,” Piñol pointed out.
With the population growing 1.9% a year and an average rice consumption of 111 kilos per Filipino, the country needs to produce an additional 221,445,000 kilos of rice a year to feed the growing population entirely from local rice production, he said.
He said this means that with an average production of 3.9 metric tons of rice per hectare, the country must irrigate an additional 80,000 hectares of rice farms to feed the new generation of Filipinos.
Piñol said that as a response to the need to ensure sufficient supply of rice at an affordable price for all Filipinos, the DA will push the distribution and setting up of solar-powered irrigation system in farming communities all over the country starting in 2018.
This would be a flagship project to irrigate an estimated one million hectares by the end of President Duterte’s term, he said.
“Given this support, the Department of Agriculture could ensure that the country would have sufficient rice supply before the end of term of President Rody Duterte,” the DA Secretary stressed. (DA-OSEC/photo by John Pagaduan)
