LA TRINIDAD, Benguet — A total of 14,366 farmers in Cordillera have been given a clean slate and a fresh start to produce, as the National Irrigation Administration (NIA) has condoned their unpaid loans and exempted them from paying irrigation service fees.
In a breakfast forum on Wednesday, NIA-Cordillera chief operations officer Liza Jane Chugsayan said farmer beneficiaries are mostly in the provinces of Kalinga, Apayao, and Ifugao.
Under Republic Act 10969, or the Free Irrigation Service Act signed by President Rodrigo Duterte in February this year, farmers with landholdings of eight hectares or less are exempted from paying irrigation service fees.
The law has also condoned farmers’ loans and unpaid fees with NIA.
Helen Laoyan, chief of the finance section of NIA-Cordillera, said some PHP390 million in loans and unpaid fees of farmers in the region were condoned as a result of the passage of the law.
The amount covered the period from 1993 to December 2017.
Aside from the free irrigation service and condonation of unpaid loans and fees, incentives were also provided to the beneficiaries such as the cost of maintenance and operations for the proper distribution of water to the irrigable areas.
Laoyan added that NIA-Cordillera released some PHP0.7 million under the incentive package.
At present, there are about 1,040 farmer-irrigators’ associations in the entire Cordillera region.
“The free irrigation service is a breakthrough. It is a big lead in increasing the productivity of the farmer-irrigators in the region,” said Bradley Grospe, NIA acting division manager.
Grospe said NIA-Cordillera has 284 projects listed for implementation this year with total budget of PHP1.5 billion.
He said 23 projects have already been completed — eight in Apayao, five each in Kalinga and Mountain Province, three in Abra, and two in Benguet.
These projects cover national and communal irrigation systems.
Among these are the Small Irrigation Project (SIP), communal irrigation system, “Balikatan Sagip Patubig” Program (BSPP), and Climate Change Adaptation Works (CCAW).
One of the projects being eyed is a solar power irrigation to hasten the irrigation development in the region.
NIA-Cordillera records also show that as of December 2017, irrigation development was posted at 52.8 percent, covering 97,896 hectares.
The region still has 185,406 hectares of potential irrigable areas. (Primo Agatep/PNA)
