MIRI: The immediate future looks rather bleak for local farmers.

Already the economic crisis has pushed up the prices of many essential items, and now they are further deprived of their cash incomes.

The current relentless drought in the northern region has not spared their rubber holdings, causing the earth to become parched and cracked.

The case of a rubber tapper in Sungai Mallang Atas area by the Bukit Peninjau-Bakong Road, about 52 kilometres from here is a good example of how life has been rather cruel to those whose livelihood depends on agriculture.

He lamented that almost all the leaves of his rubber trees have fallen, leaving the branches bare.

“Now I have to stop tapping my rubber trees as they have very little latex,” Dinil Jose said when met at his longhouse recently.

Besides rubber, other major crops have also failed in the region.

Hill padi farmers have not had much to harvest, and in some cases, the yields of wet padi have declined to only 10 per cent of the normal amount.

According to Dinil, other plants like pumpkins, ‘Dayak cucumbers’ or Dayak brinjals that are usually planted side by side with hill padi as supplementary crops are struggling to survive. They are hardly enough for the farmers’ self-consumption.

“How are we going to survive?” asked a 75-year-old padi farmer whose rubber trees have also been badly affected by the drought.

“We have toiled and sweated it out until we nearly break our backs just to put some rice in our pots. Why does God have no mercy on us?” lamented another rubber tapper, Ujang Buda.

Whatever money they had saved have all been expended, and now many of the longhouse people have very little else to depend on besides the sales of jungle produce such as ‘paku’ and ‘midin’ (wild ferns), and tapioca leaves, he said.

Their main concern now is the possibility that the dry season might last long enough to dry up their river water.

“Many longhouses and villages in Bakong depend on river and rain water for consumption as there is no piped water supply,” he said.