The Department of Agriculture (DA) is pursuing a $120 million grant for the acquisition of remote sensing and agricultural crop testing facilities under a climate change program of United States Pres. Barack Obama.

The Philippine Rice Research Institute (Philrice), a DA-attached agency, has been preparing the proposal for this financing program which DA wants to obtain in collaboration with the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI).

The proposal may be presented by DA to the US government as US-DA Sec. Tom Vilsack is tentatively set to visit the Philippines on Oct. 26.

“Our plan is to purchase high-throughout facilities. (DA) Sec. (Arthur) Yap is pursuing this under President Obama’s climate change program. I think the US is providing funds that can be availed of by countries affected by climate change. It could be a grant,” said Lawyer Ronilo A. Beronio, Philrice executive director, in an interview.

These facilities are powerful tools for planning agricultural production. It can be better than a phytotron, a greenhouse used for studying plant growth under certain environmental conditions, according to Beronio. It can give information important to cropping such as drought and flooding.

“It has the capacity to engage in high-throughput research (involving) DNA fingerprinting. It can test thousands of varieties,” he said.

Government is confident that the country can benefit from financing programs for climate change adaptation by international agencies with the country’s vulnerability to climate change’s effects due to its archipelagic nature. One concern in peninsular areas like those in the Philippines is the increasing salinity in rice fields caused by rising salty sea water inundating farms.

The development of saline water suitable rice varieties has been one of the programs of Philrice. Three saline suitable varieties have earlier been approved for release by the National Seed Industry Council (NSIC). These are the Rc 184, Rc 186, and Rc 188 which have yields of between 2.9 to 3.2 metric tons per hectare, a yield that may be acceptable enough considering the saline soil characteristic.

Philrice has initiated the use of remote sensing facilities for agricultural planning as it tied up with a private firm, Develtech, on the development of software that can read satellite images and enable researchers to translate these into useful data. Accuracy of the data is complemented by “ground truthing” or the determination of the actual representation of the data on the ground, whether blue-colored images, for instance, translate to actual irrigation and planting of rice.

With this study, a more accurate rice planting area has been determined for Nueva Ecija as of the wet season of 2008. While the Bureau of Agricultural Statistics (BAS) estimated that farmers planted on 200,000 hectares that season, the remote sensing study indicated actual planting was only on 180,000 hectares.

Such discrepancy may be the reason why rice Philippine production data can be bloated at times which may also be causing inaccurate estimation of needed rice import volume.

With the US-funded facilities, Beronio said usefulness of this remote sensing technology can be applied nationwide. Besides, the government has a plan to revive the Strategic Agriculture and Fisheries Development Zone (SAFDZ) which will maximize land use based on suitability of certain crops. The same technology will be useful in optimizing this program’s benefit.