In our youth, we recall watching movies and paying at least 25 centavos in flood tax that never succeeded in arresting floods that gets high and more destructive with the years. We have retained the distinction of paving roads before doing the drainage, dredging rivers with equipment that seldom worked. We could not enforce our forest laws, so we opted for total ban on logging activities which nonetheless continue to this day.
We expect more than a public policy that calls for mere water conservation to keep water in power dams from dropping to alarming levels. We need to root out the fundamental problem of environmental degradation, instead of insisting on the old solutions like deep wells. We don’t even have a semblance of water impounding facilities. Additional water treatment facilities like those in Cardona and Putatan would certainly help augment our water supply as long as alternative sources are also found.
In fact, most recent weather bulletins from PAGASA show that La Niña or wet conditions have come to an end, shifting to more ENSO -neutral conditions — those periods when neither El Niño or La Niña is happening. If the weather monitoring indicates that this neutral condition is expected to occur until around the middle of the year, we don’t know what to expect between now and then, and for the rest of the year when El Niño actually sets in.
Yes, the Department of Agriculture has announced its preparation for El Niño and its potential impact on agriculture especially rice. With a required 52-day rice inventory, DA announced it might have to resort to importation should domestic output falls short of requirement for food security. Recurring almost every two years to 10 years, this year’s El Niño could cause the importation of at least 3.8 million metric tons, the level in 2022.