NCotabato farmers see more income with new farm-to-market road

NORTH COTABATO - Eladio, a 57-year-old corn farmer, is confident his income will increase in the next cropping season now that the 2.5 kilometer farm-to-market road connecting their village to the town proper of Arakan had been fully concreted.

Eladio is just one of more than a thousand farmers that now benefit from the cemented thoroughfare, which straddles through farming enclaves in Barangay Dallag, a component district of Arakan municipality in the province.

Another corn farmer, Vicente, 36, said the road project, bankrolled by the office of North Cotabato Gov. Emmylou Talino-Mendoza, will enable them to deliver their products to buyers at the town proper even during rainy days.

“And we can also use one lane of the road as a dryer facility, where we can spread our corn grains to be dried before selling to the market,” Vicente said in Cebuano dialect.

Transporting farm products via the same route prior to its having been concreted was so cumbersome for farmers, according to local officials.

“During the rainy days, farmers cannot transport their harvests to the markets because of the poor road condition. The products they harvest from their farms just rot in their houses,” said Arakan Mayor Rene Rubino.

Mendoza led local officials in inaugurating the road last Wednesday.

The road straddles through Sitio Napanlahan in Barangay Dallag, where vast tracts of lands are planted with rubber trees, bananas, and other high-value orchard trees.

“This is a dream-come-true,” said Rubino, referring to the Dallag-Poblacion Arakan artery.

Mendoza said the project was funded out of a special grant the provincial government received along with the 2013 Seal of Good Housekeeping Award from the central office of the Department of Interior and Local Government.

Rubino, in a message during the launching of the road project, said he is confident Mendoza’s office can finish by 2016 the concreting of the roads connecting the town center of Arakan to Barangays Meocan and Santo Nino in the west of the municipality.