Gov’t steps up El Niño mitigation projects

The government would ramp up contractual hiring for El Niño mitigation projects in areas affected by drought while intensifying coordination with local governments to ensure that projects and programs ease damage to livelihood, the National Economic and Development Authority (Neda) said yesterday.

“The government has been fairly successful in mitigating the impact of El Niño, particularly in ensuring sufficiency in supply of food and keeping food prices stable. This is through production support like irrigation and distribution of seeds in non-vulnerable and mildly affected provinces, timely importation, and price freeze in areas that declared state of calamity,” Socioeconomic Planning Secretary Emmanuel F. Esguerra told reporters in a briefing on the government’s Roadmap to Address the Impact of El Niño (Rain).

“While drought usually entails low production leading to high agricultural product prices, inflation data show that prices of food, particularly rice, have been low and stable in the past months,” added Esguerra, who is also the Director-General of Neda, which leads the interagency El Niño Task Force.

Esguerra, however, admitted there remained gaps in implementing Rain, hence a need to accelerate the rollout of government interventions to address the problems resulting from El Niño.

“We recognize that there could be areas that are feeling the brunt of El Niño and for this, the role of LGUs [local government units] is very crucial. We are certainly bothered by the fact that there are people who still go hungry. There could be areas that are not yet being reached by government interventions,” Esguerra said.

“While the supply of food and production and other types of support such as distribution of food packs seems enough, the challenge is in making the distribution system much more efficient so that these actually reach the affected families in a timely fashion. We need to consider that some of the services are devolved to LGUs and so we need to strengthen coordination with LGUs,” he said.

Esguerra said closer coordination with LGUs was crucial especially in terms of identifying the areas that needed more assistance. “While looking at the aggregate… we probably need to do more narrow targeting.”

Also, Esguerra said the government should ramp up support for affected farmers. “We need to accelerate programs like cash-for-work and emergency employment,” he said.

Esguerra said the government could hire more contractual workers for the said programs.

Department of Social Work and Development data showed it had already released more than P900 million under the climate change adaptation as well as quick response funds for the cash-for-work and emergency employment programs.