Feed Your Own People! Localized Rice Sufficiency To Help Boost Production

The national mission to achieve Rice Sufficiency should not just be the task of the national government alone but must also be shared by Local Government Units by ensuring that they produce enough rice for their own population.
Under the Local Rice Sufficiency Program which I had previously designed, a town with a 20,000 population with a per capita rice consumption of 114 kilos every year should have at least 1,000-hectares of rice farms.
This could be undertaken by the LGU as an Economic Enterprise where it will provide Solar Irrigation Services to the farmers, seeds and fertilizer on loan which will be paid back during harvest.
It will be the Economic Enterprise Office of the town which will buy the play production to be milled in their own rice processing complex and sold back to the residents of the town.
We already have a model for this program, the town of Taraka, Lanao del Sur which has already established six Solar-Powered irrigation Systems and is now in the process of building a Rice Processing Facility.
I discovered Taraka when I moved from the Department of Agriculture to the Mindanao Development Authority where I designed a program called Mindanao Water Supply aimed at identifying areas with no water supply both for drinking and agriculture.
This led me to the town of Taraka where people relied on the Taraka River which meandered through the center of the town for their household needs.
The river served as the public bathing and washing area, too, thus the very high incidence of dysentery.
The worst part of it all was the fact that while the town was facing Lake Lanao, the rice fields did not have irrigation water.
MinDA introduced the idea of turning Taraka into a rice self-sufficient town with safe drinking water by proposing the establishment of several Solar-Powered Irrigation Projects funded by the Development Bank of the Philippines.
The idea was for Taraka to start an Economic Enterprise where the LGU will build SPIS to irrigate 700 hectares, provide farmers with seeds and farm inputs, buy the farmers’ produce, process this in a Rice Processing Facility and sell this to the local people and the neighboring communities.
The SPIS units were built, some of which are still not operating, but the good news is that the Rice Processing Facility which I requested from the DA-PhilMech had been granted.
Earlier this week, groundbreaking ceremonies were held in the Taraka for the Rice Processing Complex with local officials led by Mayor Odin Sumagayan and Vice Mayor Nashiba Sumagayan.
It is still a long way to go before Taraka finally achieves the vision of becoming a self-sustaining community which is able to feed its own people while at the same time, starting an LGU initiated Economic Enterprise which is able to recover its investments to be sloughed back into more development projects for the community.
This is the concept which should be replicated in other parts of the country as well, a localized version of Rice Self-Sufficiency where every local government unit must endeavor to provide for the food requirements of their people using their own funds and local resources.
Isipin na lang natin, if only half of the agricultural towns all over the country are producing enough rice for their constituents, that would actually contribute greatly to the National Rice Sufficiency Program.
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