Rain,rain, come again

Posted on August 6, 2007 - Filed Under |

AGRICULTURE national honcho Arthur Yap prefers to call it “prolonged dry spell” and skirts reference to a drought now plaguing the countryside. After all, even with the usually brimming dams now thirsting for water to fill their huge reservoirs and despite farmlands going barren, the earth cracking like dried cakes in at least 10 agricultural towns, there are still irrigation canals with water like Urdaneta’s Tanggal Amerikano and Tayug’s mountainside rivers to assure some harvest in those rice-producing parts.T
The real heavy rains, Yap crosses his fingers, should be coming in two weeks, within which time the San Roque Dam has reluctantly agreed — and only as a stop-gap measure –to release irrigation water downstream to nourish the parched farms and fields of farmers and allow the tillers to transplant their seedlings, most of which are just awaiting the rains that Nature has so far been withholding.  

With its huge reservoir now low in water, the dam needs every drop in its holds to turn its power turbines and generate electricity hence its reluctance to spill water down the lowlands. 

If the rains do not fall in two weeks, well, the problem shall have increased two-fold and we might just need the American Indians to do their rain-dance in this country as a last-resort, coupled with deep prayers in our homes.

Indeed, we are in a crisis.

Al Gore, effectively warning about this very phenomenon of global warming and drastic changes in weather patterns could not have been more correct. And the truth, the inconvenient and painful truth he spoke of, is happening right now not only in our neck of the woods but in other countries, other continents. Who would have thought of the Thames river in Great Britain overflowing its banks and literally flooding the Englishmen. America, the Great Country, is reeling from floods too, even in states hitherto not known for heavy rains, much less flooding. India and Bangladesh, right here in Asia, has the monsoon hitting them very wet, their evacuees in the hundreds being relocated.

Filipinos, including us Pangasinenses, do not know if we should rejoice or weep over our fate; we used to have the floods – now we have drought creeping up. As children of the world, we are, like our neighbors, paying the price of unbridled industrialization by the affluent countries.

It’s just not right, not fair, but like it or not, we’re now in an awful reality show here – pains, bumps, welts and all.

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