Livelihood windfall unveiled for 1,000 Pantabangan families

PANTABANGAN, Nueva Ecija – A cash windfall amounting to a whopping P100 million to serve as seed money for livelihood has been unveiled by the municipal government to an initial 1,000 poor families in this town.

Mayor Romeo Borja Sr. told reporters that each of the beneficiary family will be given P100,000 as start-up capital for family-based agribusiness livelihood ventures. He said that among the beneficiaries of the livelihood package are families of charcoal makers.

Charcoal making has been posing as a major headache for the municipal government which, however, was able to convince them to stop their illegal trade in exchange for other alternative sources of livelihood such as farming.

Borja said that the funds for the livelihood project will be sourced from the collections of real property tax being paid the municipal government by the California Energy International (CalEnergy), the build-operate-transfer (BOT) proponent of the Casecnan Multipurpose Irrigation and Power Project or the Casecnan Dam.

The American firm constructed the 26-km. underground trans-basin tunnel which diverted water from the Casecnan and Taang rivers in Nueva Vizcaya to the Pantabangan Dam forming part of the CMIPP’s BOT component worth $600 million. The facility was completed in 2001.

Also to be covered by the livelihood bonanza are families of 200 casual employees of the municipal government who have not been receiving their salaries for the last eight months but offered to stay on while waiting for the release of the funds.

Borja said that the 1,000 beneficiary families represent roughly one-fourth of the total number of families in the town of 4,000 families.

He said that the municipal government, while extending the livelihood aid, will strictly monitor the progress of the livelihood venture entered by every beneficiary family through a monitoring team created for that purpose. Aside from providing cash, the municipal government will provide inputs such as fertilizers, pesticides, certified and hybrid seeds and other forms of technical assistance to ensure good harvest.