Tobacco growers turn to rice farming

VIGAN CITY – Don’t look now but tobacco farmers are into rice growing too. And from the looks of it, they have almost doubled the average yield per hectare of the country’s traditional rice farmers!

Records at the National Tobacco Administration (NTA) showed that rice tobacco farmers posted an average of 5.7 tons per hectare last year surpassing the national average rice yield of 2.9 tons a hectare.

This developed as NTA Administrator Carlitos Encar-nacion gave assurance to tobacco farmers that his agency will continue to push its rice production program this year "despite scarcity of funds."

"With our successful experience of increasing their yield from 3 tons when we first started in 1999 to 5.7 tons last year, we can not afford to quit," he said.

The IFOIGAP-rice activity of the NTA intends to augment the income of tobacco farmers as well as enhance food security according to Dr. Robert Bonoan, manager of the NTA Farm Development Department.

IFOIGAP stands for Integrated Farming and Other Income Generating Activities Program. Encarnacion said that IFOIGAP activities including corn growing and vegetable, mushroom and banana production have the full support of President Arroyo and Agriculture Secretary Leonardo Montemayor.

The NTA chief also announced that tobacco rice farmers are good borrowers with the agency reporting a 100 percent collection record from its P9-million production assistance fund exposure for rice-growing tobacco farmers last year.

P8-million has been provided as production assistance this year according to Bonan who said that the decrease is partly due to the El Niño phenomenon which forced the tobacco agency to reduce the target hectarage for rice growing.

A total of 1,576 hectares were utilized last year which yielded 8,083.2 tons for an average production of 5.7 tons per hectare.

Explaining the success of their program, Bonoan said that the farmers have been pursuing the NTA-Philrice technology with the agency’s technicians supervising them. He also cited a marketing tie-up with the National Food Authority as having ensured a ready market for the farmers’ rice produce.