TABUK, Kalinga - For lack of faith in the new setup of the government's hybrid rice program, Kalinga farmers are likely to fail to deliver the orders for some 10,000 sacks of hybrid rice seeds worth more than P2 million.

Cordillera agriculture rice coordinator Cipriano Santiago said that when officials of the Department of Agriculture (DA) in Region 1 whom he had invited to the meeting of GMA Rice Program regional implementors in La Trinidad, Benguet on July 21 asked the Kalinga hybrid seed producers cooperative officials if they have the volume, he could not get a clear answer.

"The truth of the matter is that when they heard that under the regional setup of the program, the government will buy only the seeds needed by the region, they no longer planted beyond the requirements of Region 1. We kept telling them not to worry because other regions, particularly Regions 1 and 2, will absorb the excess but apparently they were not convinced," Santiago said.

Under the old national system of hybrid rice seed procurement to which the Kalinga farmers are used, the government through the Philrice purchases all their produce as stipulated in a contract forged before each cropping season, thereby giving the farmers no worry about the sale of their produce.

Under the old setup, Santiago said, Kalinga farmers had been producing 20,000-25,000 bags.

Under the new system, the government will procure only some 7,000 bags from them this season. This means that if they produce beyond this volume, they would have to sell the excess to other clients.

Santiago said that the members of the two hybrid rice cooperatives in Kalinga, namely the Kalinga Hybrid Rice Seed Producers Multi-purpose Cooperative and the Tabuk Hybrid Rice Seed Producers' Multi-purpose Cooperative, thought that with only the government buying the region's requirement, the program is as good as dead.

"The point of the regionalization is to prepare the hybrid rice cooperatives not to just depend on the government but deal with all clients. It is to wean them from government dependence. We do not expect to be able to subsidize the program forever," Santiago said. However, Santiago is hopeful that after this initial failure, the Kalinga hybrid rice farmers will learn their lesson and will have more faith that they could sell what they produce because if they fail to respond, they would be the losers.

"Kalinga is one of the ackowledged places in the country which produces the best hybrid rice seeds. What its farmers do not realize is that their produce is needed and therefore, should maximize the potential of the area for hybrid rice production. In the last cropping season alone, the DA only attained 135,000 hectares of its 200,000 hectares goal for hybrid rice commercialization because there was not enough seeds produced," Santiago bared.

Santiago said that because the yield of hybrid rice tops that of the inbred varieties by an average of two tons, there are many takers among farmers of the hybrid technology. This hikes the demand for hybrid rice seeds.

Santiago said in Tabuk alone in the last cropping season when the DA offered to farmers apart from the seed subsidy of P1,200.00 free fertilizer per hectare, some 4,000 hectares were planted to hybrid rice and that in this cropping season when the fertilizer subsidy was withdrawn, the same number of hectares is still planted to hybrid rice.