Monday, October 15, 2007 Kalinga farmers assured of production incentive
HYBRID rice commercialization program in Kalinga gets fresh windfall from the Ginintuang Masaganang Ani (GMA) rice program with the P3.3-million promised support fund for multi-purpose drying pavements (MPDP).
This is on top of the recent announcement by President Gloria Arroyo of providing all-out support to rice farmers in the country to boost production and raise rural incomes.
Provincial Agriculturist Gerry Jose said farmer groups, irrigators associations and barangays cultivating at least 200 hectares this cropping with hybrid rice are given one unit of MPDP, costing P100,000 from the program. Kalinga is listed a total of 33 MPDP units.
The fund, Jose said, is transferred from their usual procurement of organic fertilizers which he said can not come in time for this wet cropping because of tedious procurement procedure.
By the time the supply arrives, farmers must have been through with the stage of fertilizing, defeating the need for organic intervention, Jose explained.
This season, the start of the farming period was moved to July from May because of the change in irrigation services, arising from maintenance work on the canals.
Every cropping, DA-Kalinga distributes about 12,200 bags of organic fertilizer, a component of the farm interventions provided by government as support to hybrid rice production.
“If it were of a smaller volume, we can readily ask suppliers for their available stocks but the total requirement entails longer procedure,” Jose said.
He added their office decided to use the fund instead for MPDPs, realizing that the need for the facility is more pressing than that of organic fertilizer.
DA-Kalinga now accepts project proposals from applicant farmer-beneficiaries, who are willing to shoulder whatever excess incurred in the project as counterpart.
“The cost allotted for the project might not be enough, considering the prices of construction materials today, that’s why we appeal to beneficiaries to have counterpart in the labor and other incidental expense,” Jose said. Recipients are also asked to provide the lot for the project.
