LINGAYEN—Former Governor Victor Agbayani said on Friday that votes from Pangasinan would further widen the lead for Liberal Party’s presidential candidate, Senator Benigno “Noynoy” Aquino III nationwide.

Agbayani, the LP standard bearer in Pangasinan, predicts that Pangasinan will turn yellow (Aquino’s color) on election day.

He said the people fully support Aquino because he believed an Aquino presidency would bring honest officials in government.

Aquino is now leading all presidential candidates in both surveys conducted by the prestigious Pulse Asia and the Social Weather Station (SWS) with just less than two weeks to go before the May 10 polls.

The incumbent congressman of the second district of Pangasinan who is seeking to reclaim his old post he held for nine years said he would take the lead to promote good governance in the province and ensure swift delivery of basic services, infrastructure projects including the construction of 100 classrooms every year.

Part of his program, he said, is to provide free broadband access to schoolchildren in the province to help them in their education.

Agriculture would also be on top of his agenda, said Agbayani in his press statement on Wednesday.

Pangasinan, he said, is 60 percent agricultural and there is a need to build more irrigation facilities to triple the harvest of hybrid rice.

“If we can improve the farmers’ lives, they would be able to send their children to school and provide food for their family,” he said.

Pangasinan built over 100 communal irrigation systems when Agbayani was governor.

The irrigation facilities helped increased agricultural productivity allowing many farmers to enjoy the benefit of double or multiple cropping.

Agbayani attributed the capacity of farmers to shift to hybrid production to the construction of irrigation systems.

The program dramatically increased the area devoted to hybrid rice from 2,000 hectares in 2,000 to 17,959 hectares in 2005.

This enabled Pangasinan to become the province with the highest number of hectares planted to hybrid rice in the entire country, he said.

“Not only that, these irrigation facilities continue to mitigate the drought brought about by the El Nino condition, he said. -LM

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