I GOT AN E-MAIL yesterday from a friend agreeing with our item the other day to grow our own food.
Robert Harland is a former British Broadcasting Corporation correspondent and now a resident of Bacolod. He is a former president of the Rotary Club of Bacolod Marapara and a member of the Negros Press Club.
With the world’s food shortage, Robert wrote, the world should consider adopting Britain’s wartime campaign to grow one’s own food.
THE ORDER of the President to review the wages of the labor sector is timely in the light of the economic conditions now prevailing in the country. In support of this, I think the immediate convening of all regional wage boards would be best to make a review of the particular conditions in their areas of responsibilities. Since the last meeting of the board, many local market and economic conditions have undergone radical changes.
Living conditions vary from region to region or even from province to province. The best place to start would be to review the living conditions and income potentials of the 10 poorest provinces in the Philippines and see how they impact on the rest of the country. Hindsight tells us that it does not necessarily mean that because a town or province is considered poor, the living conditions there are likewise in a state of destitution. There are poor provinces whose living conditions are better than in some parts of Metro Manila. In the metropolis, one needs money for everything because everything has a price and one has to buy everything. In remote and poor provinces, people survive easily by merely going out in the fields and gathering root crops to augment their daily fare, cash-free.
THE COUNTRY’S total rice stock inventory stood at 1.68 million metric tons as of March 1, down 8.5 percent from 1.82 million a month earlier, according to the Bureau of Agricultural Statistics. This inventory is expected to be sufficient to meet consumption needs for 52 days.
The bad news is the stock is shrinking, although the bureau gilds the lily by saying the March 1 inventory was 5.7 percent higher than the 1.5 million metric tons a year earlier. Fifty-nine percent of this stock is stored in households, 24 percent in commercial warehouses, and 17 percent in National Food Authority warehouses. By the time the inventory is depleted in May, the country will be running into the lean months of July-September before the main harvest arrives.
Speech delivered at the 118th Assembly of the Interparliamentary Union (IPU) in Cape Town, South Africa
THE WORLD BANK defines poverty in the most simple and understandable manner; “Poverty is hunger. Poverty is lack of shelter. Poverty is being sick and not being able to see a doctor. Poverty is not having access to school and not knowing how to read. Poverty is not having a job, is fear for the future, living one day at a time. Poverty is losing a child to illness brought about by unclean water. Poverty is powerlessness, lack of representation and freedom.”
Poverty is a serious and urgent challenge confronting the global community.
Poverty is a global issue that must be addressed by all governments.
Today, half of the world, or three billion people, continue to live in abject poverty. The United Nations Children’s Fund estimates that 30,000 children die each day because they have no food to eat. This totals to 210,000 children each week, or just under 11 million children each year, below the age of five. We are rapidly losing our bright, future leaders to hunger caused by poverty.
STEP ASIDE food crisis. I want to write about beautiful things today. And what can be more beautiful than when rains came last Sunday and made the plants and all living things perk up?
Monday morning I listened to the birds’ songs. They were more beautiful and more lively. And we think of flowers as a poet once wrote, “April showers bring May’s flowers.”
Flowers and birds, in a mahjong game. Can other characters be more interesting? Listen to this dialog over a mahjong table, “Marè, you have to get another card. That’s your flower and you must display it.” Then later, “Parè, don’t keep your bird. I will chow it.”
AFTER a prolonged legal battle, Dr. Ramon Guerra Jr., chief of the West Visayas State University Medical Center (WVSUMC), received an order dismissing him from the hospital. But he has filed a motion for reconsideration with the Board of Regents (BOR) that meted the dismissal order and he continues to stay in office.
To recall, he was charged and preventively suspended by the hospital’s BOR January 17, 2006, for alleged grave misconduct and irregularities in the purchase of patient monitors, steam sterilizers and defibrillators from Medikotek, Inc.
WE HAVE A food crisis. It’s not really that bad. Welcome crisis. We will improve. Crisis is an opportunity to improve.
Crisis, written in Chinese, is composed of two characters, danger and opportunity. We must look at this crisis as an opportunity to improve our food production.
We have this crisis because we are not producing enough rice due to faulty government policy, giving more importance to importation which is helping other countries produce rice for us.
FORMER, FORMER AND FORMER. Former President Joseph
Estrada in a press conference called by former Iloilo Rep. Alberto
Lopez (extreme right) and his common-law wife, former Guimaras
Gov. and Rep. Emily Relucio (center) when Erap was invited as
Commencement Speaker during the graduation cemenonies of
the Lopez-owned University of Iloilo (The News Today)
Second of Two Parts/Read Part 1
WE LIVE IN a great paradox: Our leaders breed, not eradicate, corruption; they fuel, not douse, dissent. So the Moro rebellion and communist insurgency have flourished; the radical Left, the militant civil society and the political opposition are ganging up against the government.
Alienation fuelled by injustice is the root of dissent. Government after government have been deaf, indifferent or insensitive to cries for redress. As alienation deepened, the alienated opted to resort to rebellion, insurgency, radicalism, militancy and political destabilization.
That is the mire the Arroyo government is stuck in now. Is there a way out?
SINCE THE 1870’s, J.M. Basa Street which was formerly known as Calle Real, had been serving as the shopping and business center of Iloilo. Because of this, it was also referred to as the “Escolta” of Western Visayas. It was here were commercial establishments and even expensive residential structures congregated. J.M. Basa Street was actually the nerve center of Iloilo at a time when she was well-known as the “Queen City of the South”. It must be recalled that she was already elevated into a city in 1889 by the Spanish throne because of her status as a commercial center and cultural capital of the region.
Although Iloilo City was reverted to a municipality when the Americans established their colonial rule in 1901, yet it continued to serve as the “Queen” of the region all throughout the U.S. Administration. And, still, J.M. Basa Street functioned as the nucleus of Iloilo’s business life.
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