Cotabato City farmers seek water, answers on unfinished irrigation project

COTABATO CITY – Deylon Musa, 62, shares a lunch of rice and camote leaves in fish sauce with his wife Pundo and five-year-old granddaughter in a small, dilapidated hut in Barangay Tamontaka in Cotabato City just a few meters away from the ricefield he tends.

 

Just an hour ago, under the sorching heat of the sun, he finished working on his more than a hectare of farmland that used to be soaked to water from Cotabato’s tributaries.

 

But drought has been affecting his fields since early February and he can only from his window as crops that he will no longer be able to harvest wilt from the intense heat.

 

Musa’s face shows how he and other farmers have suffered from the dry spell.  

 

Musa does not know how he can make ends meet if the drought continues.  His wife earns just enough to feed the family by doing laundry.

 

“This is my worst problem, you can see it,” Musa told reporters as he gestured at the rice stalks that have been turning yellow.

'Ghost irrigation'
 

At least 19 of Cotabato City’s 37 villages have been placed under a state of calamity because of the drought that has cost the agricultural sector close to P17 million in lost crops.

 

“A state of calamity has been declared in 19 villages so that our farmers can receive assistance from concerned government agencies while our government workers can avail of calamity loans,” Mayor Japal Guiani Jr. said in an interview.

 

The mayor said he can hardly believe how the city's rice fields are drying up when it has several tributaries and is surrounded by the Rio Grande de Mindanao and the Tamontaka River.

 

Guiani also chided the National Irrigation Administration for what he called a "ghost project" in Barangay Tamontaka.

  

He was referring to a 100-hectare irrigation rehabilitation project in Tamontaka that the NIA implemented with a budget of P64 million. The project should have been completed in 2012.

 

Guiani said, there must be an investigation on the project, which turned out to have been shelved.

 

“Our farmers are now suffering because hundreds of hectares of farmland programmed for irrigation with this huge budget was not completed,” he said. “Had it been completed, it would have benefited our farmers now”.

 

“Farmers in the city should not have to experience drought and its rice fields should have ample water supply,” he said, adding that no pump houses and no irrigation dikes were found in what he calls the "ghost irrigation project."

 

Former Senator Francis Pangilinan, presidential assistant for food security and agricultural modernization, who visited Maguindanao this week was asked about the project but he declined to comment, saying no report about it has reached his office.

 

Pangilinan, who has oversight over the NIA, said he will call for an investigation.

 

More than 300 farmers working 400 hectares of farmland planted to rice and corn have been affected by the drought in the city’s agricultural sites.

 

“All I pray for is rain, more rain because we cannot rely on water from the river.  Strong rain is what we need here,” Musa said as he went into his vegetable yard for more farm work. — Ferdinandh Cabrera with reports from Joyce Toledo and Tanto Piang Jr., USM Devcom interns/JDS, GMA News