Manila, October 19 (Engineering Daily) -- The Agriculture Secretary Emmanuel Pinol reported President Rodrigo Duterte has committed PHP41 billion for establishing of solar-powered irrigation system in the Philippines for the next three years.
On October 10, 2018 Food Security Summit for the Visayas regions, Pinol affirmed that 169 small river systems in Philippines have been under construction. This has been attributed to irrigate 500,000 hectares of new rice farms and for each solar-powered system it costs PHP6.7 million.
He added the current solar power irrigation system is not intended to replace of bigger irrigations but to complement them.
The Department of Agriculture (DA) announced that 2,000 solar-powered irrigation projects will be constructed by 2019 while the 169 similar projects are anticipated to be complete by the end of this year.
This could approximately provide water to 100,000 rainfed rice areas and additional one million metric tons of rice will be produced by the areas.
The remaining 3,950 solar powered irrigation projects will be identified and completed in the years 2020 and 2021.
