THiNK Journalism

At the Inquirer , Karl R Ocampo says, "Dry Spell Brings Farm Losses To P2.8 Billion," Inquirer.Net , m.inquirer.net , where the above image comes from). This story is in fact the banner headline of the print edition of the Philippine Daily Inquirer , a copy of which on impulse I bought this morning. In the print edition, the subhead says, "Rice and corn farmers have borne the brunt of El Niño, which started more than a month ago and is expected to intensify in April. Among the hardest hit regions are Bicol and Soccsksargen, officials say." And what does my favorite columnist say? "We never learn!" (interjection from me) Talk about timing! In his Manila Times column of today, "Achieving Water Security, Part 2" (28 March 2019, Manila Times , manilatimes.net ), William Dar says (my emphasis): All the while we all knew that an El Niño episode was coming this year and what did we do in advance? Almost nothing. Or absolutely nothing. What could we hav

Philippines "lack of water" Today, Thursday, 21 March 2019, in Manila I type the above line as my search words, including the double quotes, and Google gives me 9,800,000 results! Millions of webpages – that means that in the Philippines, lack of water is pervasive in the City, as well as in the Countryside. What do they have in common as the cause of water scarcity? I say I see: Lack of consciousness in conserving water when there is plenty of it. The public complaining are the ones to blame for their water scarcity. Look at my photograph above of a ricefield – the farmer has burned half of his field because the rice stubble interferes with his puddling of the soil for planting his rice. If the farmer only knew – if the Agricultural Training Institute, ATI, only taught him to convert the rice stubble into organic matter that will conserve the water in his field – I am assuming of course that the ATI knows! Here we go again, William Dar seems to be saying in his new opinion p