TABUK CITY, Kalinga – If the continuation of the World Bank (WB)-funded rehabilitation of the Upper Chico River Irrigation System (UCRIS) will push through as scheduled from March 20 to June 30, more than half the standing crops in the Tabuk Valley, the so-called rice granary of the Cordillera, will be severely affected.
Tabuk City Agriculturist Julibert Aquino said that with most of the rice crops in the valley still in the vegetative and booting stages and the water being cut off during the work, an estimated 60 percent of the 10,417 hectares in the valley are not expected to yield more than half the usual harvest.
Aquino blames the farmers for not heeding the announcements of the National Irrigation Administration (NIA) to plant early this cropping season because there will be a three month water cut off starting March 20 to give way to the completion of the P425M project under the Participatory Irrigation Development Project (PIDP) of the WB.
Aquino said that the NIA already informed farmers as early as January last year about the programmed cut off to give them time to plant early during the wet crop of 2017 and dry crop of 2018.
“Our office helped in the information dissemination starting in September. We told the farmers they should plant as soon as they harvested the wet crop of 2017 but for reasons we do not know, they did not heed the announcement,” Aquino said.
While he agreed that farmers have invited the impending disaster through their stubbornness, UCRIS-TPFIA Vice President Adolph Bravo claimed that the misfortune will just be the last in the series of woes emanating from the WB-funded project.
He said that ultimately, the NIA and the WB are to blame due to their refusal to terminate the contract of the Markbilt Construction/RD Policarpio and Co. Inc. (Markbilt) and find a competent contractor to continue the work after the contractor had clearly shown that it was incapable of undertaking the project.
He said that they have called for the termination of the contract as early as late 2014 because at the time, the Markbilt had already racked up 29 percent negative slippage which is almost twice the delay allowed by law.
He explained that the timetable of the project was from September 2013 to December 2015 and had Markbilt been replaced with a capable contractor, the project would already have been completed and the UCRIS will now be back to the traditional May 1-June 30 cut off for maintenance instead of the programmed three months and ten days.
He said that as happened, the radial gates which, under the work schedule should have been installed in mid 2014 were not yet there when typhoon Ineng struck on August 21 causing a the washout of a 220-meter portion of the main canal which in turn resulted in loss of the second cropping of that year as the repairs were undertaken from September to December 2015.
Because of the skipped cropping, the UCRIS farmers – aside from Tabuk, the irrigation system also serves Pinukpuk, Kalinga and the towns of Quezon and Mallig in Isabela – lost an estimated P1B in unrealized harvest. The NIA also spent P150M to repair the damage.
Bravo said that what frustrated them and could not understand was that at the time of typhoon Ineng, the slippage of Markbilt was already a whopping 57 percent and the NIA and WB still refused to terminate or rescind the contract.
The second woe took place in the second cropping season of 2016 when typhoon Lawin and prolonged monsoon rains successively battered the standing crops in the Tabuk Valley causing 20-50 percent loss in harvest depending on the stage of the crops, Bravo recalled.
Bravo explained that a portion of the just repaired section of the main canal sagged and developed a leak which took all of six weeks to repair and that had this not happened, 70 percent of the rice crops in Tabuk Valley would have escaped the wrath of typhoon Lawin.
Bravo said eventually the NIA terminated the contract of Markbilt in November 2016 after two extensions but up to now the NIA has not bared how much of the project has been accomplished adding that the agency said at first that it was 54 percent and later, more than 60 percent.
Bravo said that what the UCRIS-TPFIA knows is that items of work bidded out by NIA to be undertaken during the cut off from March 20 to June 30 is P132M.
He said that the big question in their mind also is if the contractor has compensated the government for the liquidated damages it has incurred for the unfinished portion of the work.
“The name of the World Bank program is Participatory Irrigation Development Project because as stakeholders, we are supposed to participate. During the preparatory stages, we were involved but later, we were kept in the dark perhaps due to the assumption that we will just let things be,” Bravo said.
He alleged that the federation was left out of the latest WB missions regarding the project.
He also said that during the bidding of the remaining amount, they were reduced to mere witnesses as they were never part of the decision-making process.
He alleged that the first bidding held last year was nullified by the WB because of suspicions of collusion but the work has since been rebidded with winners declared.
Asked for his comments on the projected crop losses in the event the cut off would proceed, NIA-Cordillera OIC Regional Director Benito Espique who was the chief of the Kalinga NIA office while the rehabilitation project was ongoing said there will be a meeting at the NIA Central office regarding the issue.
He stressed though that the NIA is just waiting for the Letter of No Objection for the implementation of the balance of the loan from the WB then the work would proceed as scheduled. He said that the decision of the bank will be known next week.
He said that the balance of the P425M fund is P135M and that the P290M went to work accomplished by the Markbilt.
Espique declined to comment on the claim of Bravo that had Markbilt been replaced, all woes being experienced by the farmers on account of the project including the impending crop losses would not have happened.
Regarding the claim of Bravo that they are being kept in the dark on matters they are supposed to know as stakeholders, Espique said he will ask the present Kalinga NIA chief to update the UCRIS-TPFIA on these developments.
He also denied that the farmers are being left out of recent WB missions on the project saying that they were invited when their presence was required but that there were concerns exclusively between the WB and the NIA.
Regarding the allegation of collusion attending the first bidding, Espique said that the reason the WB declared a failure of bidding was lack of competition.**Estanislao Albano, Jr.
