A farmer installs a plastic pipe on a water pump to irrigate his paddy field in Winong village, Gempol district, Cirebon regency, West Java, on Sunday (11/6). Local farmers are facing water shortages during the dry season.
If the climate is following the old pattern, undoubtedly most parts of Indonesia have already entered the dry season.
Indeed there are many discourses on climate change so that last year, we recognized what is called the "wet dry season". Still, the hot weather and drought in various places assert that June is the dry season.
As we read in the dailies on Monday (12/6), agricultural lands in a number of areas are experiencing drought.
Last March, the Meteorology, Climatology and Geophysics Agency (BMKG) predicted the start of the dry season would be May, June, July. It was predicted that a weak El Nino effect in July and August would make the drought more severely felt, although it would not be as bad as in 2015.
Among other methods to overcome drought, farmers have used pumps, although the results were not very satisfactory. In West Java, farmers hope Jatigede Dam will be able to irrigate their paddy fields to avoid drought.
Agriculture today is faced with an uneasy situation. First, the climate change frequently alters the time and volume of rainfall. It can so happen that during a season which should be experiencing drought, as it is now, is disrupted by the sudden arrival of the La Nina phenomenon, which is associated with bringing rain. This can be inconvenient for farmers to choose which crops to plant –those needing a lot of water, or those that need only a little water.
An Inconvenient Truth by former US vice president Al Gore literally confronts farmers and mankind with a new and bitter, inconvenient reality. There are many new things we have to understand and act upon.
Amid the problems faced by farmers, news has again begun to emerge about forest fires. "The old disease" seems to have returned after being sparked by the dry air.
While the symptoms are not yet severe, we want to remind the government that, for the two challenges being faced – agricultural drought and forest fires –it has to take real steps and action.
For farmers in rice production centers, aside from optimizing existing technologies and infrastructures, a proactive measure needs to be taken. If cloud seeding has the potential to help, it is not wrong for us to prepare this technology. For forest fires, if dry weather comes consistently, it is not wrong to prepare preventive operations as well as water bombing aircraft, in case the preventive measures fail.
Do not leave it until disaster comes and we are helpless, and can only trigger a policy that is too little, too late.
