Nueva Ecija town wages campaign against rats

SAN ISIDRO, Nueva Ecija – After losing roughly P150 million worth of rice crops per cropping season due to rat infestation, farmers and local officials in this town situated 100 kilometers northeast of Manila are finally winning the war against hordes of rats invading their farms, thanks to "Oplan RED," an anti-rat campaign to exterminate the rodents by killing them right at their own dens.

RED stands for Rat Eradication Day which involves a massive campaign to exterminate rats with the use of rodenticide.

Mayor Sonia Lorenzo told The STAR that since embarking ona RED campaign, they have killed thousands of rats which have destroyed, since December, thousands of hectares of rice crops in the town. "Red is definitely our answer to the problem of rats in our place," she said.

Like most agricultural areas in the country, this town is periodically attacked by pest rodents. In December alone, this town’s farmers reportedly lost P100 million when rats ravaged 5,000 hectares of rice crops.

Local officials have also expressed concern over the bacterial disease caused by rats, particularly the dreaded leptospirosis, which occurs worldwide but is most common in temperate or tropical climates like the Philippines, usually following a flood. It peaks from August to October when rains and floods are frequent. The incidence is increasing in urban areas.

Leptospirosis made headlines in the country in 1999 when it downed hundreds of inmates at the Manila City Jail after heavy rains flooded the compound. Among its symptoms are high fever, severe headache, chills, muscle aches and vomiting, jaundice (yellow skin and eyes), red eyes, abdominal pain, diarrhea, rashes. It is also a vector or transmitting agent for 60 other infectious and deadly diseases such as hemorrhagic fever, hanta virus, trichinosis and bubonic plague.

A factsheet prepared by the municipal government on rats quoted a report from the World Health Organization (WHO) which said that damage caused by rodents worldwide amounted to 33 million tons of agricultural products per year, enough to feed 130 million people.

The Department of Agriculture (DA) reported that the country will not have to import rice if government can prevent the estimated 10 per cent loss of grains in warehouses due to rat attack. Grains spilled by rats were found to have been contaminated with cancer-causing microorganisms.

Lorenzo said the rat infestation problem is magnified by the fact that farmers do not have the financial resources to effectively eradicate or control infestation. Worse, the use of traditional means or deadly chemical rodenticides are no longer effective.

She said that in this town, some 250,000 cavans of rice worth P150 million is lost per cropping season due to rat infestation, accounting to 50 per cent of its average rice crop production. The gravity of the problem prompted the municipal government to adopt the RED with the battle cry "Sakit ay pigilan, daga ay lipulin," (disease prevention, rat extermination).

The campaign started last December with a rat extermination campaign around the 4,000-square meter wide municipal public market with its underground drainage and sanitary facility believed heavily inhabited by rats.