It will cost approximately ₱200 million to implement an aerial pesticide spraying campaign across all sugarcane lands on Negros Island to combat the Red-Striped Soft Scale Insect (RSSI) infestation, United Sugar Producers Federation of the Philippines (UNIFED) President Manuel Lamata said on Friday, July 10.
UNIFED convened a meeting with Negros Occidental mayors and their representatives at Nature’s Village Resort in Talisay City to discuss a unified, collective campaign against the pest.
During the meeting, Lamata urged the mayors to individually declare a state of calamity within their respective local government units. Doing so would enable the LGUs to allocate the necessary funds to fight the RSSI crisis, specifically through aerial spraying, he said.
“This is a very alarming situation and we have to move fast to save this coming sugarcane crop,” Lamata said.
According to Lamata, domestic sugar production has already dropped by 20 percent in the last crop year due to the RSSI infestation. He warned that inaction could lead to catastrophic results for the local economy.
“If we don’t do anything now, sugar production could drop to 1 million tons next year, and that would be very, very bad for Negros,” Lamata emphasized. “The economic backlash will be very dire for the entire Negros, we have to act now”, he said.
Representatives from Davao Aerowurkz Corporation, an aerial pesticide spraying firm, and Ruby Cruz, the country’s largest fertilizer and chemical supplier, were also present at Friday’s meeting.
Lamata explained that UNIFED is proposing a two-pronged strategy.
Aerial spraying serves as the immediate, drastic measure to contain the damage and buy time for the industry to transition back to a sustainable, long-term solution.
The permanent solution involves establishing laboratories in all mill districts to cultivate fungi capable of permanently killing RSSI, but Lamata said that this will take time.
While acknowledging that the proposed aerial spraying is expensive, Lamata maintained it is vital to saving the sugar industry.
Operating a single aircraft costs ₱55,000 per hour to cover 100 hectares of land. Traditional backpack spraying and drone-only spraying would be too slow to address the scale of the current crisis, Lamata said.
To address safety and environmental concerns, Lamata assured that the airplanes will maintain a 200-meter buffer zone away from residential houses and will strictly avoid flying over poultry farms and fishponds.
Drones will instead be deployed to spray the restricted areas that airplanes cannot fly over.
Lamata added that the pesticides are safe and will not harm humans, while noting that heavy rains would also help naturally reduce the RSSI population.*
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