WE SHARE the observation of former Congressman, now Iloilo Vice Governor, Rolex Suplico that the Bicameral Conference Committee version of the cheap medicines bill, which he originally authored in the 11th Congress, is a sell-out to foreign drug companies.
The regulatory provisions in the original bill have been removed, leaving the pricing of medicines to wider [...]

WE HAVE undergone 36 years of land reform since Presidential Decree No. 27 of then President Ferdinand E. Marcos, and now under CARP or the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program.
Government has spent some P200 billion of public funds in the budget for land reform, but we ended up in 2008 as the world’s biggest importer of rice!
The [...]

OF COURSE, you know FIELDS. It is the government’s answer to the present rice crisis, arrived at during a summit recently held at the Clark Freeport in Pampanga under the auspices of the Department of Agriculture (DA). It is the acronym for F-ertilizer, I-rrigation, E-ducation and training for farms and fisherfolks, L-oans, D-riers & other [...]

PRESENTLY, there are two annual budgets for 2008 at the Iloilo Provincial Capitol – that of the Governor and the other, that of the Sangguniang Panlalawigan (SP). And each is insisting that his or their budget should be the one in operation.
We understand that there is already a case in court asking it to decide [...]

LT. COL. CARLOS P. Romulo – the last man off Bataan, was at the Manduriao airport of Iloilo City when Bataan fell to the Japanese on April 19, 1942.
He left Cabcaben Airport in Bataan under heavy Japanese shelling around 1 a.m. of April 9, 1942 and landed in Mindanao at dawn.
After taking his breakfast at the [...]

OUR PROBLEM on the rice shortage may indeed be serious because, aside from the experts and various consultants that we already have in the Department of Agriculture (DA) and the National Food Authority (NFA), the Palace has additionally created a special position of Adviser on Rice and Fish.
It appointed one Pedro Pelagio, who immediately announced his [...]

A RECENT survey showed that people believe there is a rice shortage even in Iloilo City, which is not supposed to be so, considering that Iloilo and the whole of Panay are net rice-producing areas with a total produce said to be capable of feeding even the whole of Visayas.
In fact, a friend in the [...]

SOME BUSINESSMEN are just so conscienceless. Give them a reason, even the slightest reason to speculate, like the recent reckless talks on rice shortage, and they would jack up the prices of their commodities without the least sympathetic thought for the buyers, many of whom could now hardly eat three times a day.
I was at a [...]

ILOILO HAS BEEN known as the “Food Basket and Rice Granary of the Philippines.” We wonder if we still are because now, we see many of our people consuming National Food Authority (NFA) rice. About 50 percent of more than 4,700 square kilometers of our land is devoted to agriculture, with rice as its main product.
We [...]

LAST WEEK, we asked: “What happened to the muscovado sugar industry of Antique?” It used to be a major economic activity in the province.
Antique is a small province of 471,514 people in Western Visayas, but, as previously reported, it has the most number of muscovado mills in the country. Muscovado can become the new “gold” [...]