Fresh typhoon hits northern Philippines as crop damage rises

A tropical storm that strengthened over the weekend made landfall as a typhoon in the northern Philippines, as the country grapples with millions of dollars in crop damage from a series of relentless cyclones this year. 
Typhoon Toraji, known locally as Nika, came ashore on the coast of northern Aurora province on Monday morning, with top sustained winds of 130 kilometres per hour, according to an advisory from the Philippines’ weather agency. That makes it the equivalent of a Category 1 hurricane on the five-step Saffir-Simpson scale. 
The system is expected to dump more than 200 millimetres of rain in some regions of the main Luzon island, including Aurora and Isabela provinces, according to a separate forecast. 
The storm comes just days after Typhoon Yinxing clipped the north coast of Luzon twice, bringing heavy rains to the area. The Philippines’ Department of Agriculture estimates that Yinxing has caused 278 million pesos ($4.8 million) in damage, almost all of it crop-related, and that number could increase as further assessments are conducted. That adds to the at least 11.5 billion pesos in crop losses caused by storms and monsoon rains this year, according to government data compiled by Bloomberg. 
The Philippines is currently near the end of the planting phase of its dry rice-growing season. With soil already waterlogged from recent storms, there is heightened risk of re-flooding and rain-induced landslides. Last week, the country’s government-run National Irrigation Administration called for changing the rice planting calendar to minimize crop damage from storms, local media reported.
Toraji is expected to track across northern Luzon on Monday and exit into the South China Sea by the evening. As it moves over land, the storm will weaken from interactions with the Cordillera mountain ranges, according to the US Navy’s Joint Typhoon Warning Center.
This is the 15th tropical cyclone to affect the Philippines this year. The country sees an average of 20 tropical cyclones a year, making it one of the world’s worst-hit countries.