Flooding may cost farmers $5 million

Flooding may cost farmers $5 million

BANDUNG: Flooding in the past few days has damaged several
thousand hectares of rice fields in several regencies in West
Java, which will mean little or no harvests this season in the
affected areas, a senior official has said.

Entang Ruchiyat, the chief of Agriculture Office at the West
Java provincial administration, said on Friday that, due to the
flooding, the estimated harvest failure of over 6,000 hectares
would cost farmers approximately Rp 45 billion (approximately
US$5 million).

He claimed that 24,000 hectares were saved after the farmers
and government officials pumped water out of the rice fields.
With the harvest failure, the farmers in the area had lost the
opportunity to produce some 30,000 tons of rice, said Entang. --
JP