Small but terrible! Tiny Desert Nation Israel Teaches Modern Irrigation

Israel, a tiny nation in the Middle East with a land area of 2.077-million hectares which is one-fifth of the area of Mindanao, last night showed to agriculture stakeholders from about 20 countries the effective use of water to produce food for its people.

The five weekly on-line lectures on Modern Irrigation and Fertigation in Tropical Regions which was launched last night is jointly sponsored by the Mashav Israel’s Agriculture Agency, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Participants, mostly agriculture technologists from around the world, joined the lectures on-line.

I was the only foreign Cabinet-level official invited to speak at the opening of the international lecture series along with Israel Ambassador to the Philippines Rafael Harpaz, and Ambassador Irit Savion Waidergorn, Director of the Training and Capacity Building of Mashav.

While I was only expected to make a short presentation on the initiatives of the Philippines to adopt the Solar-Powered Irrigation Technology when I was Secretary of Agriculture, I decided to stay on-line to listen to the 2-hour lecture of Israeli Agronomist Roy Peleg who talked about modern irrigation technology.

Repeatedly, Roy Peleg mentioned the Philippines and its potentials because of the availability of water, including the highly successful trial the Israelis made on a sugarcane farm which increased its yield by 90% using drip irrigation.

What was actually very educational was the part where Roy Peleg rated all irrigation systems according to their effectiveness in boosting production and proper water utilization.

Drip Irrigation was rated as the most effective while gravity-driven open canal irrigation was classified as the most inefficient.

Sadly for the Philippines, open canal gravity driven irrigation system is the norm in Philippine agriculture today, especially in rice farming.

At the end of the whole session, I realized how we had long squandered a very important resource – water – and how a tiny nation, one-third of whose area is desert with a rainfall which is less than half of what we have in the Philippines, is so productive because their leaders focused on water management and irrigation.

I felt sad that until today, many of our decision makers, especially those who allocate funds for government programs and projects, still have not realized the importance of water.

An Israeli agriculture expert emphasized this when he said said last night that “There is no Agriculture if there is no water.”

#foodgrowswherewaterflows!

#AgricultureIsCommonSense!

(I made these screen grabs last night during the Session 1 of the International Webinar on Modern Irrigation and Fertigation in the Tropical Regions conducted by the Mashav and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Israel.)