CATBALOGAN CITY, Samar - The provincial governor of Samar is confident that one of the towns in the southern part of the province will become a rice granary once the irrigation project will be fully functional to serve the farmers in the area.
Samar Gov. Sharee Ann Tan Delos Santos expressed her confidence that the farming systems in Basey town, some 100 kilometers from here, will be modernized after the irrigation project in the municipality will be in full operation.
Delos Santos emphasized that with the completion of the irrigation system in the town of Basey, which is one the biggest and oldest municipality in Samar, will become the rice granary in the southern part of this province.
As this developed, Samar Provincial Irrigation Officer Amadeo Montejo said that the provincial office here of the National Irrigation Administration (NIA) has already conducted the test run for the P725 million irrigation project in Basey last month and delivered more than 2,000 liters of water per second to the irrigation site of the town through the nine-kilometer main canal from the P16 million dam located at the Bugasan River, the water source of the irrigation project.
Montejo said the test run has partially irrigated nearly 100 hectares of the easternmost part of the more than 3,000 hectares to be irrigated by the project.
Montejo added that it is the target of his office to construct the lateral canals and irrigate 1,000 hectares, or one-third of the irrigable area, in the 2011 cropping season.
He said that the full operation of the irrigation project is expected by the end of 2012.
Delos Santos said the Basey irrigation project is one of the biggest irrigation projects in Eastern Visayas and will irrigate 3,000 hectares of the more than 6,000 hectares of irrigable area in Basey, benefiting some 3,000 farmers.
Delos Santos disclosed that at present, the farmers only depend on rain for their rice farming.
She also added that the average harvest in Basey at present is only 40 cavans or two tons of rice per hectare per cropping.
She expects that this figure will increase to an average of 90 cavans or 4.5 tons per hectare per cropping once the irrigation project is completed.
It was learned that the construction of this Basey irrigation project has been started in the early 1990's and was proclaimed by the then President Fidel V. Ramos as one of the priority irrigation projects of the country.
