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By Ira Karen Apanay, Senior Reporter
THE Department of Agriculture will ask farmers
to advance the third cropping season for palay immediately after the
summer harvests under its quick turnaround program to take advantage
of the La Nina, that will last till mid-2008.
Agriculture Secretary Arthur Yap said the agency
will urge farmers to plant a second crop immediately after the
harvest during the first half of the dry season, instead of
inserting a third planting after the wet season under the quick
turnaround.
Yap noted that the forecast by the Philippine
Atmospheric, Geophysical and Astronomical Services Administration (Pagasa),
showed that rains triggered by La Nina would last until the first
half of the year.
“This Pagasa forecast means there will
be adequate water for more than a million hectares of rainfed areas
planted to palay,” he said.
Based on recent equatorial Pacific sea
surface temperature trends and model forecasts, Cruz had said that
Pagasa predicts that the La Niña episode in the country could last
until June or August this year.
The Agriculture department has institutionalized
the quick turnaround program as a long-term strategy to raise palay
yields by at least 20 percent annually and enable the government to
attain national self-sufficiency in this staple, Yap said.
Last year, the insertion of a third
planting season in some 100,000 hectares in the Visayas and Mindanao
had offset crop losses in four Luzon regions hit by the dry spell.
It also helped the department drive the farm
sector to a better-than-forecast growth of 4.68 percent, helping the
gross domestic product expand by a 30-year-high of 7.3 percent in
2007.
Yap earlier reported that the quick turnaround
program for 2007 managed to raise harvests of palay to 350,000
metric tons and of corn to 200,000 metric tons more.
Yap explained that the adoption of the QTA
program will help the Department achieve a national rice
self-sufficiency level of 92 percent, fulfilling President
Arroyo’s “Pagkain sa Bawat Mesa-Laban sa Kahirapan”
goal.
The department is targeting a 6.67-percent
increase in palay harvests for 2008 to an all-time high of 17.33
million metric tons.
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