TABUK CITY, Kalinga – Five weeks is all farmer John Duclan needed to harvest his rice crop in his remaining six hectare farm.
Sudaypan Dacay-og of Burayucan, Sucbot, Pinukpuk, this province, also informed the ZigZag Weekly that within six weeks, around half of the more than a hundred hectares in their sitio would have been harvested.
But with typhoon Lawin wreaking havoc in the province last week, Duclan and the Burayucan farmers will be lucky if they could salvage what they spent on their farms this cropping season.
The two farmers point to the six-week water interruption in the services of the National Irrigation Administration (NIA) in June and July as the culprit for their fresh troubles.
The NIA had to stop the operation of the Upper Chico River Irrigation System (UCRIS) which waters the farmlands of the Tabuk Valley and Pinukpuk, Kalinga and the towns of Mallig and Quezon in Isabela so that it could repair the weakened portion of the repair work on the washed out section of the UCRIS’ main canal in barangay Calanan here.
The repair work done by the ASC Construction at the cost of P100M from September to December last year sagged and developed a leak end of May this year.
The washout in the UCRIS main canal took place during typhoon Ineng in August 2015 on account of the failure of the contractor of the P425M World Bank-funded rehabilitation of the UCRIS to install its radial gates before typhoon Ineng hit the province on August 21, 2015.
Under the contract, the Markbilt Construction/RD Policarpio and Co. Inc. should have installed the radial gates in June 2014.
Duclan and the farmers in Burayucan are by no means the only victims of the UCRIS mess.
Tabuk City Agriculturist Julibert Aquino informed that had there been no six-week delay in the cropping calendar, 70 percent of the harvest from 10,417 hectare rice lands in the Tabuk Valley would have been saved.
Aquino estimates that the crops caught by typhoon Lawin at the booting stage would incur 70 percent loss while those in the milking stage would loss 50 percent and those already ripening will loss 20-30 percent.
UCRIS farmers lost an estimated P1B in expected rice harvest when they failed to plant in the second cropping of 2015 when the washout incurred during typhoon Ineng was repaired.
NIA Kalinga Manager Benito Espique declined to comment on the issue.
“The damage of typhoon Lawin on the crops of UCRIS farmers would have been significantly less had the contractor of the washout repair done his work properly,” Fr. Claudio Bagano, chairman of the Kalinga-Apayao Religious Sector Association (KARSA) said.
The KARSA along with the Tabuk Multi-purpose Cooperative are the complainants in the ongoing Commission on Audit (COA) investigation of the implementation of the WB funded rehabilitation project as well as the washout repair paid from NIA funds.
The second extension of the Markbilt Construction/RD Policarpio and Co. Inc. ran out on June 2, 2016 with 54 percent of the work remaining unfinished.**By Estanislao Albano, Jr.