Agriculture Secretary Leonardo Montemayor said other factors that may contribute to greater productivity are adequate irrigation, the use of high-yielding rice varieties, and manageable pest infestation.
Montemayor said the yield of ricelands is expected to increase by 1.3 percent while the irrigated areas contributing to a higher yield of palay are expected to grow by 1.8 percent.
The optimistic forecast stems from projected increases in rice productivity in the second and third quarters at eight and seven percent, respectively. The first quarter yield of palay dropped by two percent from a year-ago level.
Romeo Recide, director of the Bureau of Agricultural Statistics, said the bulk of the gain in the January-to-June crop would come from the second quarter in which production is expected to grow significantly with area-harvested and yield-per-hectare ratios expanding by 4.2 and 3.3 percent, respectively.
"Plantings for the July-September crop is expected to increase by some 6.4 percent, despite isolated dryspells reported in Camarines Sur, Saranggani, North Cotabato and Sultan Kudarat," Recide added. "Land in fallow are expected to be cultivated in provinces where current weather still favored plantings."
In corn, Montemayor said production is projected to grow by three percent after a seven-percent increase in the sector’s productivity in the first quarter this year.
He pointed out that the gains in corn productivity in the first quarter are expected to be eroded by a projected 12-percent drop in the April-June period primarily due to the sluggish performance of the four major corn areas, namely Cagayan Valley, ARMM, Southern and Central Mindano.
"Floods, continuous rains, shifting to other crops such as palay, eggplant and tomato, sugarcane, and banana, are among the reasons cited for the lower output in said areas," Montemayor said. "Contributing to the decline were bad peace and order situation, rat infestation and dry spell in Southern Mindanao."
Because of this sudden drop in corn productivity in the second quarter, the next result, he added, for the January-June period would be a drop by 2.3 percent from the same period last year, settling at 1.93 metric tons with the areas for harvest decreasing by 3.8 percent.
"To recover lost production in the second quarter, farmers intended to increase their plantings for the third quarter crop despite the threat of El Niño," Recide said, adding that the July-September crop could grow by 8.1 percent to 1.71 million metric tons or 129,000 metric tons higher than the previous year’s crop.