QUIRINO

Financial assistance to farmers mulled after cloud seeding fails to raise water level at Magat Dam

BY LUIS JOSE

CABARRAGUIS, Quirino – The provincial government here is mulling possibility of giving financial assistance to hundreds of farmers in the province who are adversely affected by the ongoing dry spell.

This was after cloud seeding operations failed to raise the water level at the Magat Dam.

Gov. Dakila Cua told local newsmen this was just one of the things his administration was taking into consideration as a way of solving the drought, which was already affected some 400,00 hectares of rice and corn land in the province.

“We are still assessing the damage in the province and we need to actually pinpoint the areas most severely damaged by the dry spell before we can execute a plan of action to solve the problem,” Cua said.

A source from the National Irrigation Administration in the region said results of the ongoing cloud seeding in the region, which began July 28 have not been sufficient to cause any significant rise in the water level of the Magat dam.

“If substantial amount of rainfall is felt in the watershed areas surrounding the Magat dam, then continuous rain from three to five days will make a difference. But as in any cloud seeding process, you are not absolutely sure where the rain will eventually fall,” said Edwin Paion, NIA’s flood forecasting officer here.

Meanwhile, DA regional director Gumersindo Lasam confirmed cloud seeding had started in the region on July 29.

But he refused to make additional comments or to quantify the total extent of damage of the ongoing drought, saying he did not want to preempt Agriculture Secretary Arthur Yap on the matter.

Yap had done an evaluation of the Pantabangan, San Roque and Magat dams in Nueva Ecija, Pangasinan and Isabela to see the extent of the drop in the water levels of the said dams since the beginning of the dry spell.

“We cannot as yet give any figures on the extent and cost of damage to agricultural cops in the region, but we are consulting on ways to alleviate this matter,” Lasam said.

Cua, son of Quirino Rep. Junie Evangelissta Cua and former Gov. and Rep. Mary Ann Cua, added that if it comes out in their evaluation that providing financial assistance is “the proper thing to do” in order to jumpstart the economic recovery of his farmer-constituents,” then in that case, we will do it.”

Farmers had expressed hope that with the eventual coming of the rains, everything will be solved, including the critical levels in the Magat dam and the resultant intermittent brown-outs brought about by the lack of available water in the dam t run the turbines.

Quirino is one of the hardest hit areas of the Cagayan Valley region, which was aggravated by the reduction of water supply for irrigation from the Magat Dam in Ramon, Isabela, which went down 30 percent.

Meanwhile neighboring Isabela province, the second biggest province in the country, is now considered the top rice and corn producer per hectare in the country, even besting the traditional rice bowl, Nueva Ecija in Central Luzon.

Built during early 1980s, the Magat Dam, once the biggest in the entire Southeast Asia, irrigates more than 150,000 hectares of agricultural lands in Southern Cagayan Valley region, with Isabela the biggest beneficiary of its irrigation water. It also provides at least 500 megawatts of electric power for the Luzon grid.