Ompong-affected farmers in Cagayan anticipate good harvest

36-year old Kleng is excited for the days ahead. Life has been kinder to them in the months following typhoon Ompong’s (international name Mangkhut) wrath in Cagayan province, she shares.

“We got the support we badly needed after the typhoon, thanks to the generous people who helped us. With God’s grace, we will be able to harvest from our corn field by end of March or first week of April,” she smiles, pointing at the .5-hectare field they are renting.

With funding support from Aktion Deutschland Hilft, World Vision was able to distribute corn, rice and vegetable seeds to more than 1300 families in her community in Gattaran, Cagayan. Corn and rice seed beneficiaries also received an amount of P2300 intended to support their expenses for farm labor.

“We are anticipating an income of P20,000 (USD400). This already excludes the share of the land owner. This is a very good news for us because last cropping season was really bad,” she adds. Kleng shares that their debt has piled up because their plants were reduced to the ground after Ompong. If they did not receive help with the farm inputs for this planting season, the cycle of debt would have continued.

Kleng and her husband John plan to use the income to complete the repair of their house which was also partially damaged by the typhoon.

“We will always say thank you for the support we received during our trying times. Because of that help, we will not only be able to repair our house but we will also be able to save some of the money for our children’s school supplies for the new school year in June,” says Kleng. They have three children, a boy and two girls, aged 15, 11 and 9.

Typhoon Ompong, which struck last September 15, 2018, has affected more than 3.8 million people and damaged 300,000 houses, according to the social welfare department’s Disaster Response Operations Monitoring and Information Center (DROMIC). It also decimated farmlands, leaving P26.8B (USD535M) worth of damage in agriculture.

World Vision immediately provided emergency essentials that included emergency shelter kit and hygiene kits, kitchen sets and other non-food items that include mosquito net and plastic mats. With the help of different partners like Aktion Deutschland Hilft, the organization was also able to support the early recovery of the affected families. To date, World Vision has reached a total of 11,409 households through its multi-sectoral interventions in the relief and early recovery phase of the response.


Give Now


Stay up to date with World Vision Philippines! Follow us on FacebookTwitter and Instagram 



Related Stories