"No crop will be spared especially if the land is totally rainfed," Negros Occidental Governor Eugenio Jose Lacson said Sunday, March 10.
Lacson pointed out that if a farmer has underground irrigation, you would think twice about using your deep well, considering the cost of fuel.
The damage caused by the drought has reached P77,702,833.81 as of March 1, a report by the Office of the Provincial Agriculturist to Lacson showed.
The governor said he has not yet received an update from the Department of Agriculture which sent personnel to the province to survey the possibility of conducting cloud seeding operations in the affected areas.
The drought also affected 76 barangays, 1,955 farmers, and 1,669.71 farmlands in the province, the report said.
Sugar plantations, meanwhile, in central and southern Negros Occidental have been the hardest hit areas of the El Niño phenomenon, the chief agriculturist of the Sugar Regulatory Administration (SRA) reported.
Ma. Lourdes Almodiente, SRA chief agriculturist, said the effect of the ongoing drought in the southern part of the province is more intense.
She said that they are now consolidating the data to know the impact of the drought.
"We expect to release the data next week," she added.
As part of its intervention to minimize the impact of the drought, she said the SRA had earlier launched an information dissemination for sugar farmers to prepare them for the El Niño.
“We are also giving away irrigation facilities to recipients of rapid propagation programs of the SRA,” she added.*