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It has been more than 25 years ago ever since my family has settled in our current locality and throughout those years, I have been a witness to all the many changes that have gone through my area, including the infrastructures and facilities which plays an important role in enhancing the quality of life of the people. From muddy roads now all paved with cement and well lit streets that only relies on the moon for light at night. From manually fetching water on deep wells to having running water on faucets and for having a public market close where I can buy most of my daily needs instead of going to the next town. Unlike few years ago, we even have now a close elementary and high school along with covered courts where recreational sports and events can be held. Not only that they promote social interaction but this facilities also helps in the development and progress of the locality. But even with all this developments, our locality still doesn't have an irrigation facility to support its farmers.
Compared from when my family arrives in our current locality, it has become more and more urbanized as the time goes by due to the continued influx of people and it was primarily because of this that the leadership that manages my locality gets it funding from the government for building the various facilities that we now have. But still, many portions of the land under our locality were used for farming as it serves as the main livelihood of the original residents for a long time, allowing parents to send their child to college and yet, the construction of an irrigation facility has been sideline until now.
And since there was no proper irrigation, most of the farmers would only plant on their fields during rainy seasons with the primary focus on rice as it was the staple food of the country. But even rainy season does not guarantee that there will always be rain the entire season and that there will be enough rainwater to grow the crops. I have seen instances where hectares of rice fields just withered because the fields did not have enough water to grow rice, resulting for all the handwork of this farmers to be wasted along with the money that they invested, some of which they loaned on banks or pawned their land. I believe there are some support that the government give to the farmers when their crop withered but I do not know if it is enough for them to recoup their lost but more than that, the rice that was lost means less supply in the market and results for its price to increase.
But this lack of irrigation was not a problem that my locality only face but was a problem for many parts of the country and because of this, our country has come to the point that it cannot self- sustained our needs and need to import rice from neighboring countries. This is quite ironic because decades ago, we used to teach other countries about rice production, including Vietnam which was ravage by the Vietnam War but now, because of the negligence in the development of the agricultural sector, we come to the point that we need to export rice to them.
Development was not a bad thing and our locality have gone quite far in terms of the changes throughout the years but this neglect with the lack of irrigation facility for crops and the overall agricultural sector needs to be addressed by the government before the farmers decided to sell their farms which could make the overall food sustainability more difficult to achieve.
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