Roland de la Cruz, NACUSIP national president*
The National Congress of Unions in the Sugar Industry of the Philippines (NACUSIP) on Saturday, Oct. 31, commended Negros Occidental Governor Eugenio Jose Lacson “for the highly successful implementation of the recent cloud seeding operations that brought much-needed relief to moisture-stressed agricultural lands across the province.”
The labor federation, in a press statement, highlighted the collaboration and partnership between the provincial government, the Department of Agriculture (DA), the Bureau of Soils and Water Management (BSWM), and the Philippine Air Force (PAF).
By utilizing military hardware and state weather technicians, the 28-day campaign completed 38 cloud seeding sorties totaling 52 flying hours and deploying 456 bags of salt as a seeding agent, proving that direct coordination with state defense forces is the absolute blueprint for efficient public service, it said.
With the DA-Negros Island Region (DA-NIR) rolling out a ₱30-million cloud seeding project to mitigate the severe impact of an impending Super El Niño, NACUSIP strongly urges the Sugar Regulatory Administration (SRA)—which is helping identify target areas—to aggressively promote a “whole-of-government” approach and completely discard plans to charter or rent private aircraft.
“We cannot afford to waste precious government allocations on exorbitant private rentals when taxpayers money already sustain the operations of the Philippine Air Force,” said Roland de la Cruz, NACUSIP national president, said.
“Renting commercial planes is an unnecessary luxury and a wasteful expenditure that takes away peoples money that should otherwise go directly to agricultural input subsidies and direct support for distressed agrarian reform beneficiaries and sugar workers,” he said.
NACUSIP reiterated that the PAF’s 900th Air Force Weather Group has already demonstrated a 100 percent success rate during the September-to-October operations in Region 6 and the Negros Island Region.
This flawless operational record leaves no logical or economic justification for any government body to contract out these services to private entities, it said.
As agricultural damage in Negros Occidental mounts to ₱41.98 million, affecting thousands of marginal farmers and workers, NACUSIP stressed that every single peso of the ₱30-million budget must be optimized.
Maximizing inter-agency partnerships guarantees that the people’s taxes are spent purely on actual weather mitigation assets like vacuum sodium chloride (salt) and jet fuel, rather than lining the pockets of private aviation contractors, it said.
NACUSIP called on the SRA leadership to align cleanly with Lacson’s strategy of cost-efficient governance, ensuring that public resources are protected and spent exclusively for the practical defense of the agricultural labor sector.*
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