DAVAO CITY—The National Irrigation Administration (NIA) would look at putting up more deregulating dams, or catch basins, near the dams maintained by hydroelectric power plants to utilize the water that is only drained into the river after running the turbines.

“We have put that up near the San Roque Dam, which is operated by the National Power Corp. as part of the Agno River irrigation project,” said Alexander Renyan, deputy administrator and the officer in charge of the NIA. 

The water was being used only to run power, he said, “and whether the NIA needs it, natatapon lang ito [it just goes to waste].”

“What we would do is to make a deregulating dam to catch the water thrown to the river, and we [will] distribute it to the irrigation canals,” he said.

This deregulating dam would be made with a budget of P4.5 billion, and it was bid out and awarded to a Chinese investor.

The China Export-Import Bank would lend the capital. The dam would irrigate 32,000 hectares in Pangasinan.

Renyan said that this would be his strategy to complement the overall policy of directing all irrigation associations to conserve water and  adopt alternating use among member irrigators.

This has been done early last month in South Cotabato and other Central Mindanao provinces, considered the rice bowl of the country, with the province’s eastern Marbel Valley and the western Upper Valley devoted to rice.

Reynaldo Legaspi, provincial agriculturist, told the BusinessMirror last month that the reduced rainfall was already felt in December last year, the month that the Philippine Atmospheric, Geophysical and Astronomical Services Administration  also publicly warned of an impending El Niño.

Legaspi said that in drier areas, irrigators’ associations adopted rotational use of water, while some areas had to plant 5,000 hectares devoted to rice with corn, which requires less water.

The dry spell would be advantageous to high-value crops, however, like mango and durian, which, he said, were on their flowering stage.

Rainfall would have dislodged these flowers “because these fruits usually require at least two weeks of dry weather.” Nelly Ilanan, chief of the Regional Agriculture and Fisheries Division  in Soccsksargen, said  the same concern over the flowering of high-value crops was raised by farmers in North Cotabato, also a major rice-producing area.

The farmers reacted negatively to the suggestion of conducting cloud-seeding.

Renyan said, “I am not bothered.  We don’t have a lot of problems in Mindanao and the director there said that the crops would not be affected until harvest.”

Central Mindanao has 120,000 hectares irrigated. 

Northern Mindanao and Davao region has 100,000 hectares each of irrigated land and Western Mindanao has 40,000 hectares.

In many parts of Luzon and the Visayas, the need for water was as pronounced as in large areas in Northern and Central Luzon and some parts of Southern Luzon. 

Places like Masbate also showed adequate rainfall despite a big part of Bicol were showing signs of water stress.

The Philippines has 202 national irrigation systems, which are managed by the NIA, and 6,000 communal systems or managed by farmers’ associations.

Renyan said that while many communal systems need rehabilitation and repair, some national systems were not also repaired due to the repeated pound of typhoons.

“Our repair and rehabilitation projects were already undertaken as early as 2006, but the typhoons damaged some of them,” he said.

This was the condition of some irrigation systems when the drought this year began to scorch the country.

Source: Business Mirror