MANILA — President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.’s visit to flood-hit Camarines Sur in Bicol on Saturday, Oct. 26, became an occasion for some Cabinet Secretaries accompanying him to discuss development projects to rehabilitate the region from the devastation due to Severe Tropical Storm (STS) Kristine (Trami).
At the briefing, some plans were discussed, but the main focus was the over 50-year-old Bicol River Basin Development Program (BRBDP).
The BRBDP was initiated in the 1970s to focus on geography-based development in the Bicol region. This was then one of the major regional development programs of the Marcos Sr. administration.
It was a $46.8-million package primarily funded by USAID, with support from the Asian Development Bank (ADB) and the European Economic Community, and overseen by the Ministry of Public Works and Highways back then.
However, a major criticism against BRBDP was its heavy focus on physical infrastructure.
Nevertheless, the BRBDP’s irrigation and land consolidation (agrarian reform) projects marked notable development of rural organizations and institutions, such as the Bicol Integrated Health, Nutrition, and Population Project.
In the mid-1980s, the benefits of the program were finally noticed, resulting from road improvements as manifested in greater mobility, travel time savings, improved access to markets as well as to medical, educational, and recreational facilities, and trade.
Also, some 400 target barangays were provided with communal water systems and environmental sanitation facilities. Coinciding with the programs social, economic, and health benefits, mortality and malnutrition rates in the provinces of Camarines Sur and Albay had markedly gone down.
As what happened recently, frequent typhoons and flooding in the Bicol River Basin disrupted economic activities and human development.
While some BRBDP projects provided long-term benefits to communities, certain problems linked to the program and the natural geography of the river basin still persist.
Areas of development
There are three integrated areas of development (IAD) in Camarines Sur.
One is the Libmanan IAD, which involves 4,000 hectares of irrigation, drainage, flood control, and farm. It faced design, coordination, and environmental challenges. For instance, USAID funding served half of serviceable constructed areas, and the National Irrigation Administration (NIA) had taken the required continuous rehabilitation work since then.
Another area is the Bicol IAD, which involves combined land consolidation and pump irrigation projects covering 2,300 hectares.
The third is the Rinconada IAD that developed Lake Buhi for irrigation (to service an additional 8,000 hectares) and a pilot upland development program in selected areas within the 10,000-hectare Lake Buhi watershed.
The discussion on the BRBDP has drawn out some reflections, ideas, and recommendations from Cabinet Secretaries present during the Camarines Sur briefing.
One idea is that BRBDP requires collaboration with the National Economic and Development Authority (NEDA) and the Regional Development Council.
For it to fully succeed, it needs well-designed and transparent projects in terms of contracting and procurement processes. It also needs to employ a highly participatory approach, such as in the case of the Buhi-Lalo project, where irrigators’s associations were involved.
On the management side, BRBDP needs an improved management approach, that is, from its centralized, top-down approach, which limits local input and ownership, affecting sustainability.
The program’s extensive coordination layers risked diluting commitment and creating inefficiencies.
Both BRBDP and its successors highlighted the difficulty of integrating large-scale development projects with local needs, particularly under centralized management structures.
And finally, it needs complementary social programs to maximize human development benefits. (PIA DMD)
