Former Department of Agriculture (DA) secretaries Emmanuel Piñol and Leonardo Montemayor, urged administration officials to establish a nationwide solar power irrigation system (SPIS) to help achieve rice self-sufficiency at price-competitive levels.
The former agriculture officials said in a statement that around 200,000 hectares of land inadequately serviced by the National Irrigation Administration (NIA) will benefit from such a program.
They explained the hardly serviced areas are usually located at the tail-end of the NIA’s dam-sourced irrigation distribution system and often gets minimal to no water at all during the dry cropping months of the year.
They also said that since SPIS is powered by solar energy, this will also help cut farmer irrigation expenses as there is no need for petroleum to fuel machinery and therefore a boost for the green energy program.
Piñol in 2017 introduced the SPIS program in M’lang, Cotabato and establishedsuch system in Lumban, Lagunain in subsequent years as DA chief.Piñol also the government of Israel offered the Philippines a P40-billion soft loan package to fund over 6,000 SPIS units that would have benefited 500,000 hectares had the program been supported by the previous administration.
Pinol’s colleague, Montemayor, said a similar proposal was submitted to the Office of the President early this year by businessman Oscar Violago but that Malacanang has yet to act on it as well.
There already are over 300 SPIS established by the DA, the Department of Agrarian Reform, the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region and the various local government units.
But Montemayor said “these and future development plans need to be coordinated and scaled up to (help) achieve rice and food security goals at the soonest time possible.”According to the Philippine Statistics Authority, the country’s rice self-sufficiency ratio, or the extent at which it relies on its own productive capacity to meet demand for the staple, has deteriorated to only 81.5 percent in 2021 from 85 percent in 2020.
President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.’s administration targets a rice self-sufficiency ratio of 97.5 percent by 2028 through programs such as the use of hybrid rice varieties to optimize yield.
