COTABATO CITY (October 5, 2025) — The floods last month that swept through dozens of barangays in two provinces in the Bangsamoro region and in its Special Geographic Area had subsided but the regional government’s social services ministry continued supplying evacuees with food rations still.
The flood-stricken residents in low-lying areas in the Bangsamoro region’s Maguindanao del Norte and Maguindanao del Sur provinces and in the 63 barangays in its Special Geographic Area, or SGA, in Cotabato province are reluctant to return to their villages for fear of a repeat of the calamity owing to unpredictable sudden weather changes.
Local executives in different towns in Maguindanao del Sur and Maguindanao del Norte told reporters on Sunday, October 5, that personnel of the Ministry of Social Services and Development-Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao continued providing their displaced constituents with food supplies until last Friday.
The MSSD-BARMM’s relief operations last week also covered parts of the SGA, which has eight newly-created towns under the Bangsamoro government, but are in Cotabato province in Administrative Region 12.
Reports obtained from local government units and the provincial offices of the MSSD-BARMM in Maguindanao del Sur and Maguindanao del Norte indicated that the ministry facilitated the delivery last week of 10,950 food packs to Moro families in areas hit by floods last month.
MSSD-BARMM field workers had also distributed 3,204 hygiene, water, sleeping and infant kits to villagers in the two provinces and in the SGA last week.
Local executives in the eight newly-created towns in the SGA separately told reporters on Sunday that they are grateful to officials of the MSSD-BARMM and the chief minister of the Bangsamoro region, Abdulrauf Macacua, for embarking on extensive relief works for barangays under their local government units that got inundated with floodwaters spawned by heavy rains in mountain ranges around.
The 29 towns in Maguindanao del Sur and Maguindanao del Norte and in the SGA that got flooded last month are near Central Mindanao’s 220,000-hectare Ligawasan Delta, a catch basin for more than a dozen rivers that spring from mountain ranges in highland areas in provinces around.