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THE Department of Agriculture (DA) will establish a third cropping
season for palay starting this year as a strategy to improve yields
by at least 20 percent yearly and achieve a national
self-sufficiency level for this staple.
Agriculture Secretary Arthur Yap on Tuesday said
this high-growth plan is in step with the Department’s mandate
under the Medium-Term Philippine Development Plan to focus on food
and jobs.
The DA adopted the third cropping program
in 2007 to cushion the impact of the dry spell on farm growth.
Yap said that the adoption of the quick turn
around (QTA) program, which yielded a 20- percent increase in palay
harvests last year by inserting a third cropping season, will help
the Department raise palay output in 2008 by 5.78
percent—equivalent to a historic peak of 17.3 million metric tons
(MT)—and achieve a national self-sufficiency level of 92 percent.
“If we institutionalise the third
cropping season we can already produce 20 percent of our target for
a given year,” Yap said. “We are now looking at off-season
production sites for the QTA this year.”
Yap earlier said that in 2007 the DA tapped
101,000 hectares of land for its QTA program, which was implemented
mostly in Mindanao, to offset production losses in Luzon farmlands
that were hit hard by a mid-year dry spell.
The QTA program for 2007 managed to raise
harvests of palay to 350,000MT and of corn to 200,000MT, defying
earlier forecasts that climate change would pull down crop yields,
particularly in several regions buffeted by the climate change.
Yap said that for 2008, “the DA will continue
with its strategy of opening more irrigated lands and utilizing seed
technologies to further increase palay production, which will
receive an additional boost with the recent approval by President
Arroyo of the Department’s augmentation budget for its post
harvest program this year.“
Philippine agriculture, including the farming
and fisheries sub-sectors, managed to grow 4.68 percent in 2007,
even a little more than the government’s original target of a
minimum growth of 4.5 percent, despite the dry spell that crippled
farm growth in the second-half of the year.
Agriculture Secretary Arthur Yap said that last
year’s growth rate was higher than the 2006 expansion of 3.84
percent.
-- Ira Karen Apanay
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