BY AMADO MACASAET

Last week, the temperature hit a high of 37 degrees Celsius. People in urban areas complain against the heat. It makes them uncomfortable. Farmers have the same discomfort but they worry more about the possibility of a poor harvest if the dry spell gets too long. Without irrigation, plants turn into crisp brown. No fruits.

More than 400 farmers scattered in some towns of La Union, Ilocos Norte, Cagayan, and Ilocos Sur are reasonably certain that a possible long dry season will not affect their harvests of tobacco and palay. They welcome the rain but can do just as well without it.

There is so far, about one million cubic meters of rain water they can use for the two crops without having to pay. It was the foundations of Lucio Tan which have spent close to P12 million rehabilitating old dams that now hold rain water to the brim.

A farmer from La Union told Malaya Business Insight that two old dams in the town of Balaoan now hold 73,000 cubic meters of water which can irrigate about 30 hectares of rice field for a second crop. The first crop is rain-dependent.

What the farmers in the area are beginning to see is the certainty of having two rice crops a year, and keep the tobacco harvest increasing or staying at the same volume.

Tan’s foundations are making all these possible.

Tan’s Fortune Tobacco buys all the leaf in the North. The other cigarette makers won’t touch them. But providing irrigation is not intended to keep Tan’s hold on tobacco production. The farmers can sell to anybody but it is only Fortune that buys them in bulk.

A bosom buddy of Tan said that the taipan believes that in time, but not in his lifetime, the tobacco industry will die a slow death. Not just because the campaign against cigarette smoking as hazardous to health is succeeding.

The other big factor is the rising cost of production made even higher and unprofitable by increasing excise and other taxes. At present about 60 percent of the price of a pack of cigarettes represents taxes.

If the Department of Finance is allowed to accept a proposal by a Swiss company for strip stamps on cigarette packs, the cigarette makers will have to pay about P2 billion a year or P14 billion in seven years for the stamps.

Probably believing that the success of Fortune is largely owed to the tobacco farmers in the Ilocos region, Tan’s friend said the taipan is preparing the farmers for other cash crops such as rice as a fall-back position.

Before the foundations of Tan rehabilitated the dams and reservoirs, the farmers did not have irrigation. They make one harvest of rice every year.

With impounded water, the farmers can have two crops a year, the second completely dependent on water from the dams and reservoirs.

There are no estimates on how much rice production will increase as a result of dam-water irrigation. What is certain is the farmers will continue to have tobacco as a cash crop and two harvests of rice for home consumption and sale.

Tan has long been told that a long dry spell leaves tobacco a losing business. The agronomists have told the farmers that while water is available from deep wells of 10-15 feet, what the pump spouts is salt water that makes the leaf unfit for anything, least of all for cigarettes.

Tobacco is usually planted in December and harvested by March. Rain water is not abundant during those months.

Water from the repaired reservoirs and dams saves the farmers from possible hunger. It also assures them of adequate rice harvest since they get two harvests in a year. The second crop is made possible by irrigation, courtesy of Tan’s foundations.

The plan is to rehabilitate all the reservoirs and dams in all tobacco and rice growing provinces of the North. The technicians of the foundations, cooperating with local governments, are looking at several other dams that can be revived.