A Philippine town learns to cope with climate change

Ninfa B Quirante in Philippine Information Agency: Dolores local government is trying to cope with climate change through planting alternative crops other than rice. The town is the biggest rice producing municipality in the province but due to too much rain and severe flooding, Dolores River overflows destroying homes and the rice farms.

Mayor Emeliana ‘Ewit’ Villacarillo visited Barangays Quiatan and Magsaysay; two barangays reachable by the Dolores River after an hour of rivercruise and gave a lecture on climate change and how it has brought erratic rains that destroyed their ricefileds. “We will not fight the weather anymore, we will cope with it,” Villacarillo told the gathering of some farmer-folks in upstream Dolores.

The mayor did not discourage her people to plant rice, but told them to plant other crops as well to make sure that they will have reserve resources should their ricefarm fail them. “The LGU will pay you Php 5.00 for every banana or abaca plant you have,” Villacarillo challenged the farmers.

“The agricultural technician will check on your abaca and banana plants and you will be paid every Saturday,” the lady mayor added. The mayor recalled that during her first term as a mayoir she urged two barangays to plant abaca, the abaca yield has tided them over these hard times when rice did not reach its desired production….

Map of Eastern Samar showing the location of Borongan City, created by Mike Gonzalez (TheCoffee), Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license