ANTIQUE – The Department of Agriculture (DA) has allotted P167 million financial assistance for 33,506 farmers in the entire province of Antique.
Distribution of financial assistance to 33,506 farmers will begin on Monday, March 14.
The first two towns to receive financial assistance are San Jose and Belison.
Each farmer will receive P5,000 assistance under the Rice Farmers Financial Assistance (RFFA).
For this, Gov. Rhodora Cadiao said Agriculture Secretary Dar William provided P167M financial aid to Antique farmers believing that it would be a great help to farmers, especially in their farming.
Nicolasito Calawag, the provincial agriculturist, said Antique has more or less 43,000 farmers, however, only 33, 506 are registered to the Registry System for Basic Sectors in Agriculture (RSBSA).
The RSBSA is an electronic compilation of basic information of farmers, and fishermen, those who are registered will be the target beneficiaries of agriculture-related programs and services.
“The basis is registered farmers based on RSBSA. If you are not a registered farmer you will never get the help,” Calawag stated.
Calawag also encourages those farmers who have not yet registered to RSBSA to visit the office of their Municipal Agriculturist to register for them to avail of various programs and services given by the DA.
“How many of us are going from house to house, some farmers are not registering for good reasons. But, the first distribution we had when the pandemic started was about 23,000 people who were still registered,” Calawag added./PN
