TAGUIG CITY (MindaNews / 23 August) — There is something almost cruel about being warned of drought while watching floodwater rise.

In August, we look at swollen creeks, drenched farms, overflowing drainage canals and afternoon skies that seem capable of emptying an ocean over us. Somewhere a farmer is praying for the rain to stop.

A few months from now, that same farmer may be looking upward and praying for it to begin.

This is the paradox facing Mindanao as 2026 enters its final months.

PAGASA says El Niño is already present in the tropical Pacific. Its climate models give roughly a 97 percent probability that the phenomenon will persist through the first half of 2027, with an 81 percent chance of reaching very strong intensity during the October–November–December 2026 and November–December–January 2026–27 seasons.

Mindanao PAGASA officials have put the warning more plainly: enjoy neither the rain nor the present abundance carelessly. The island may still receive plenty of rainfall while we are in the rainy season. But as Amihan sets in and El Niño strengthens, rainfall deficits could deepen into meteorological drought, then agricultural drought, then hydrological drought — eventually reducing water in rivers and reservoirs used for farms, households and hydroelectric generation.

We know this story.

The troubling question is why, after experiencing it repeatedly, we continue behaving as though every El Niño were our first.

Water Everywhere, Until There Isn’t

Mindanao has no shortage of water in the abstract.

Mountains capture rain. Rivers descend from the highlands. Lake Lanao holds one of the country’s great freshwater reserves. Bukidnon feeds major river systems. Rain falls heavily over eastern Mindanao. Tropical disturbances periodically pour enormous volumes of water over the island.

Yet abundance in the wet months does not automatically become security in the dry months.

That requires storage.

It requires watersheds capable of absorbing rainfall rather than shedding it rapidly into rivers.

It requires irrigation systems that do not lose enormous amounts of water between source and field.

It requires farm ponds, small impounding systems, communal reservoirs, functioning canals and rainwater harvesting.

It requires cities that treat rain as a resource rather than merely something to flush toward the nearest river.

Most of all, it requires planning across political boundaries because water refuses to observe them.

A raindrop falling on a Bukidnon mountain does not ask whether it belongs to one municipality, another province, an irrigation district or a power corporation.

It simply flows downhill.

Our institutions are often less fluid.

Harvest the Rain

PAGASA’s own advice to agriculture is wonderfully unglamorous.

Conserve water.

Maintain irrigation systems.

Establish rainwater-harvesting facilities.

Use drought-tolerant crops where appropriate.

Conserve soil moisture.

Adjust planting according to forecasts.

None of these sounds like a flagship project.

Perhaps that is precisely the problem.

We are attracted to infrastructure that photographs well: a large dam, a gleaming irrigation canal, a ceremonial groundbreaking.

But drought resilience is frequently built from thousands of smaller interventions that never make the evening news.

A farm pond in Bukidnon.

A rehabilitated communal irrigation system in Cotabato.

Contour farming on an upland slope.

A restored watershed above a river.

A cooperative installing drip irrigation.

A barangay mapping every functioning and abandoned water source before the dry season begins.

A rainwater tank beside a school in Lanao del Norte.

And now I understand why my father insisted on building one at the back of our house in Cotabato. At the time, it was simply one more practical decision made by a man who had learned not to waste what the sky provided. Decades later, with another El Niño upon us, it feels less like an old household habit and more like inherited wisdom.

Multiply that instinct across thousands of homes, schools, farms and barangays in Mindanao, and rainwater harvesting stops being nostalgia. It becomes infrastructure.

It becomes stored water.

That is what matters.

The Farm Is Where El Niño Becomes Personal

Meteorologists describe drought in millimeters.

Farmers experience it in sacks.

First, the rain becomes unreliable.

Then the soil dries.

Seeds germinate unevenly. Corn curls under the sun. Irrigation rotations lengthen. Vegetable farmers pump deeper and spend more on fuel or electricity. Livestock search farther for water. Fruit trees become stressed at precisely the wrong flowering or fruit-setting stage.

Eventually the climate forecast appears in the market.

Less corn.

Smaller harvests.

Higher feed costs.

Higher vegetable prices.

More expensive meat.

Lower farm incomes.

More borrowing.

The phrase agricultural drought sounds clinical until one remembers that behind it is a family deciding whether the next planting is still worth the risk.

Mindanao carries more of this risk than its urban consumers may realize.

Across Bukidnon, North Cotabato, SOCCSKSARGEN, the Davao Region, Caraga, Zamboanga Peninsula and BARMM are enormous areas where rainfall is not simply weather. It is working capital.

And the cruelest part of agricultural drought is that intervention often comes after the damage.

We count hectares affected.

We estimate crop losses.

We distribute assistance.

We declare calamities.

All necessary.

But by then we are financing recovery instead of resilience.

The better question in August 2026 is not how much assistance we will distribute in March 2027.

It is how much water we can store before September and October are gone.

Then There Is Agus–Pulangi

Mindanao’s El Niño story is not only about farms.

It is also about electricity.

For generations, the Agus and Pulangi hydroelectric plants gave Mindanao something extraordinary: large quantities of indigenous renewable energy generated from water.

Their strategic importance remains substantial.

NAPOCOR reported in July that 17 of the 20 generating units of the Agus–Pulangi system were delivering...

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