I am writing this article Sunday morning here in Taipei, where the sun came out gloriously as I woke up at six and the brightness pores into my hotel window at half past seven. On Saturday morning, my flight from Manila was delayed by more than two hours, as Taipei watched first where Typhoon ‘‘Karen” was headed. I was lucky to get here even if the delay was almost three hours. The late afternoon and evening flights to Manila were all canceled.
But the weather bulletins from back home are quite distressing. Typhoon “Karen” promises to be quite “destructive,” so it is reported. Last night it was confirmed that it should barrel through Aurora, thence Nueva Ecija, Tarlac, and exit through Pangasinan, covering a wide swath of some 500 kilometers.
Wow! That’s the country’s rice bowl. And it’s two or three weeks before farmers harvest our major palay crop. Hopefully not.
Presciently, the National Food Authority bought some 250,000 metric tons of rice recently. Much of these are already being unloaded in our ports, or en route from Vietnam. That’s the equivalent of less than 400,000 tons of palay.
On September 26, 2011, Typhoon “Pepeng” unleashed an awful lot of rain at exactly the same area which “Karen” is now pummeling. The following morning, as we traveled from Candaba and San Simon, through La Paz in Tarlac, Zaragosa and San Antonio, to Gapan in Nueva Ecija, the tragedy of a single day of massive rainfall hit us. Thousands of hectares of palay were down, drowned by flood and mud. Just as the “pregnant” palay stalks, heavy with the golden grain that feeds our massive population were about to be harvested.
Days after, the sad estimates of damage came out: that single day, some 980,000 metric tons of harvestable palay were lost. That was more than 600,000 tons of milled rice.
Nueva Ecija is the country’s biggest palay granary, followed by Isabela, which is tops in corn, then Pangasinan, where “Karen” is supposed to exit. If the typhoon maintains its strength and water load as predicted, we may have a similar if not worse situation as that single day in 2011. Remember “Ondoy” in 2009, which inundated Metro Manila and stranded us all in our cars for a day and a night? Well, the result in Central Luzon of that torrential rain was worse. Then “Pedring” followed “Ondoy” weeks after. And Pangasinan was heavily damaged. Again, hopefully not.
Malacañang should immediately order the NFA to buy storm-damaged palay at cost (that’s P11 per kilo). Makabawi man lang sa gastos ang magsasaka. Otherwise, families in the central plains will go hungry, just as Christmas is around the corner. Good if they have an overseas worker who can send some dollars to tide them over.
This requires quick action, because storm-damaged palay is basically useless.
Caked in mud, recovery is practically nil. And the NFA cannot buy such palay whose rice recovery is zilch unless allowed by the Office of the President, from where augmentation funds could be authorized.
In 2011, we asked Malacañang for an emergency meeting so we could be authorized to buy storm-damaged palay. It wasn’t until October 15 when the President and Secretary Butch Abad of the DBM deemed it proper to hear us and the Department of Agriculture officials. By that time, there was hardly anything to buy or recover. The NFA requested for just about 40 million, while the DA asked for 500 million. 40 million because there was little more to buy from the impoverished farmers who sold their caked-in-mud palay to the commercial traders for much less than the cost of planting and nurturing the would-be harvest. Abad, who used to chair the Committee on Agriculture in the lower House years ago, merely smiled at the DA Secretary’s request. “Forty million lang pala, ok na,” he remarked.
We were told by DBM officials to advance the funds and a SARO would soon be released. As far as I recall, no funds were ever released thereafter.
Hopefully not this time. Better yet, as I write this in sunny Taipei this Sunday morning, “Karen” weakens as it hits the Sierra Madre and spares the nation from a food crisis. Those farmers are still reeling from the effects of the severe El Niño that parched their paddy fields of much-needed water. They delayed their wet-season planting, and now that they are about to harvest (early November), “Karen” strikes.