Remote-sensing technologies needed for anticipatory inflation management – NEDA

The National Economic and Development Authority (NEDA) visited Dumangas, Iloilo on November 17-18, 2023 for a demonstration of SARAi deployment of remote sensing technology in the area.

This is a part of NEDA’s continuous efforts to explore the potential of remote-sensing technologies to gather timely crop data to help the Inter-agency Committee on Inflation and Market Outlook (IAC-IMO) provide anticipatory inflation policy advice.

Project SARAi, or the Smarter Approaches to Reinvigorate Agriculture as an Industry in the Philippines, is a remote-sensing technology developed by the University of the Philippines Los Baños, used for monitoring agricultural production.

The Dumangas SARAi team demonstrated to NEDA the generation of maps of various crop commodities to monitor the growth and health of the crops in Dumangas using satellite data from the Google Earth Engine. The satxellite data is then validated using a mobile phone app or a specialized drone.

They also demonstrated the use of data alongside local and national weather forecasts to provide crop advisories for Dumangas farmers in their mother tongue.

“While SARAi has been shown to be useful and implementable at the LGU level, it is currently piloted in a few LGUs only. It will need to be implemented more broadly to tap it’s potential to guide policy-making,” NEDA Assistant Secretary Reynaldo R. Cancio said.

The SARAi teams also shared the challenges they had to overcome when capacitating their pilot LGUs to use SARAi technology; primarily the lack of sufficient and trainable, permanent personnel who would operate the SARAi technology.

“I think that’s a function of both financial resource constraints and a lack of appreciation of the benefits of the technology,” Cancio commented.

He added further that the national government could support the deployment of remote-sensing technologies like SARAi if needed.

“For LGUs with financial resources, it’s a matter of explaining the benefits. For those with constrained resources, a case could be made for financial assistance by the national government or cost-sharing if it is deemed important enough by both levels of government,” Cancio said.

He also emphasized the need for remote-sensing projects like SARAi to coordinate with other similar projects for it to be applicable for inflation management on a national level.

“We need to improve coordination of the various projects to avoid overlaps, duplication, and potential confusion,” Cancio explained.

NEDA together with the rest of the IAC-IMO will continue to provide inflation policy advice with existing data sets while continuing to study the potential of remote-sensing technologies like SARAi as a data gathering tool for inflation management.