MANILA – The Department of Agriculture (DA) on Friday assured the public that no anomalies were involved in the flagged road coordinates for proposed farm-to-market road (FMR) projects.
This came after the People’s Budget Coalition (PBC) pointed out wrong road coordinates for proposed FMRs supposedly located in agricultural lands but were mapped in waters near other countries.
In a Zoom interview, DA spokesperson Assistant Secretary Arnel de Mesa said these are part of encoding errors.
“Wala namang anomalya diyan… Minsan talaga, again, as part ng encoding, nagkakaroon ng human error (There’s no anomaly there… Sometimes, again, as part of encoding, there will be human errors),” de Mesa said.
“But if you look, the majority are correct. So, siguro kung karamihan talaga ay mali, then makikita mo talaga doon na intentional na magkamali (perhaps if the majority are wrong; then you can see that those are intentional mistakes). But that was not intentional; it’s plainly human error in encoding,” he added.
De Mesa explained that they are using two-point coordinates instead of single-point, including the starting and end point.
“Yung pinaka-sections talaga nandun, Nagkamali lang ng pag-input. So, pwedeng tama yung unahan tapos yung end nandun sa kabila (the actual sections are there, but the inputs are wrong. So, the starting point may be correct, but then the end is on the other side),” he said.
The agriculture official thanked the PBC for its observations and vowed to enhance ways to prevent similar encoding errors.
In particular, the PBC flagged a proposed FMR project in Nueva Ecija, Quezon, but it was mapped in waters near the Benham or Philippine Rise.
Other coordinates supposedly found in Cebu and Quezon were found to be mapped in the Celebes Sea near Indonesia and in waters near Brunei Darussalam, respectively. (PNA)
