Presidential issuance on socialized irrigation fees to bescrapped?

CABANATUAN CITY -- A move to return the collection rate for irrigation service fees (ISF) from the present socialized system to the old one is now gathering steam among officials of the National Irrigation Administration (NIA) and irrigators' associations nationwide.

STAR sources said a consensus among Agriculture Secretary Edgardo Angara, NIA Administrator Manuel Arevalo and the National Confederation of Farmers and Irrigators' Association (NCFIA) has been reached seeking to formally ask President Estrada to scrap Administrative Order 17 he issued in 1998 imposing a socialized ISF for farmers and bring back the old rates to raise much-needed funds for the cash-strapped government agency.

Arevalo, in an interview after he accompanied President Estrada in Licab, Nueva Ecija Thursday, admitted that the proposal is being deliberated on in the Board but said nothing concrete has come out of it yet. "As far as I know it's still on the drawing board as of now," he said.

The plan to revert to the old system of collecting ISF was discussed during a seminar attended by Angara, Arevalo, farmers and leaders of irrigators' associations at the Development Academy of the Philippines (DAP) recently.

AO 17 was issued on August 31,1998 by President Estrada to alleviate the plight of farmers who were burdened with paying ISFs and amortization on communal irrigation systems (CIS).

Under the order, the NIA collects from farmer beneficiaries of irrigation systems between one to three cavans of rice or its cash equivalent for landholdings of one to five hectares for the diversion scheme during the wet season and between 1.5 to 4.5 cavans during the dry season. Under the so called reservoir or storage scheme, NIA collects from 1.5 cavans to four cavans for tilled lands.

Under the old set-up, farmers pay two hectares during the wet and three hectares during the season under the diversion scheme and 2.5 cavans per hectare and 3.5 cavans per hectare for wet and dry, respectively under the storage scheme.

Engineer Manny Collado, regional irrigation manager of the NIA in Central Luzon, said that irrigators' associations feel that irrigation systems nationwide cannot operate effectively without sufficient operating budget. He noted that irrigation systems are largely dependent on ISF collections for financial viability.

"Napakalaking tulong sa atin kung saka-sakaling mababalik tayo sa dating rate (It will be a big help for us if we could revert back to the old rates)," he told employees during a meeting.

Engr. Mar Santos, officer-in-charge of the Angat-Maasim Bay River Integrated Irrigation Systems (AMBRISS), said returning to the old rate would enable the various systems to break even in terms of maintenance and operating expenses. He said that in his area alone, they failed to collect even a single centavo of ISFs last week.

A check with the NIA regional office in San Rafael, Bulacan showed that the ISF collections of NIA was reduced by more than 50 percent since the imposition of the AO 17 as compared with the previous years.