Food, glorious food. A resident stands on a rice field in Banaue, home of the famous rice terraces. The price of rice in Asia is starting to stabilize as producers harvest the first crop of the year, boosting supplies of the grain. Malacañang Palace dispelled fears that President Arroyo was poised to use the escalating prices of oil and food as a basis for wielding emergency powers. The country’s permanent representative to the UN, Hilario Davide, also called for donor funding for rice research, beginning with support for the International Rice Research Institute, which is based in the Philippines.  --NONIE REYES

CONGRESS wants to amend a four-year-old law imposing a complicated excise system on alcohol products to make it simpler and sensitive to inflation.

“One of the limitations of the present system is the failure of the specific tax system to automatically capture changes in the net retail price of alcohol products,” the proponent, Rep. Danilo Suarez, said of House Bill 3787.

BELEAGUERED bosses of the Joint Foreign Chambers (JFC) will be asked to come back to the Senate and face anew Sen. Juan Ponce Enrile, this time for hearings on remedial legislation intended to tighten antitrust regulations.

“They [JFC heads] will be called back on the hearings of the antitrust law,” Sen. Miriam Santiago told reporters after Friday’s meeting of the Committee on Energy, where the JFC officials were grilled by senators to explain why they wrote a letter asking President Arroyo to halt moves to amend the Electric Power Industry Reform Act (Epira), when the Epira law is already undergoing amendments in Congress.

THE march of the peso continues with another P1.50 per liter added to the pump prices of gasoline, kerosene and diesel over the weekend on the heels of oil futures that broke the $135 mark, and P1 per kilo added for liquified petroleum gas (LPG).

With oil companies making money hand- over-fist last year and this year, local observers have the suspicion that so-called uncollected underrecoveries had been inflated in the local market, although these same observers offered no proof.

WHILE activist students called the value-added tax (VAT) regressive and the student subsidy drawn from it as just a “Palace  gimmick,” Malacañang loudly expressed Sunday its suspicions those calling for the VAT to be removed, or at least suspended from being imposed on oil and electricity, are the rich and the “wannabe Presidents.”

Chief presidential counsel Sergio Apostol said on radio, “If the VAT is suspended, who will benefit—the rich or the poor? The rich are the biggest consumers. So there’s really no reason to suspend it.”

THERE’S no reason to panic. The Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP) has a full year’s budget this year and will continue even if it lapses Tuesday, June 10.

This was the assurance of Malacañang Sunday to prospective farmer-beneficiaries who had become restive after the bill extending the land-reform law failed to be taken up by Congress before it goes on a monthlong recess Wednesday.

IT seems they are still at it trying to emasculate the cheaper-medicines law. And Sen. Mar Roxas II, who worried they may succeed, warned at the weekend such last-ditch backdoor lobbying could still achieve its aims and alerted all concerned.

The recently signed cheaper-medicine law had been, for more than a decade, anathema to multinational pharmaceutical companies fearing it greatly eats into their enormous profits—as can be seen from the much cheaper medicines in neighboring countries—and Roxas was fearful they would do everything to protect these profits.

Foreign-currency deposit units, or FCDUs, proved less profitable in 2007, posting net income of $738 million or 5.1 percent lower than in 2006.

According to the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas, the industry posted simultaneous declines in both net interest and noninterest income that effectively subdued the 12-percent or $15-million drop in operating expenses to $111 million from $126 million.

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CUSTOMERS buy medicine at the Botika ng Bayan outlet on Tordesillas Street in Makati City. The cheaper-medicines bill was signed into law Friday, boosting hopes that vital drugs can become more affordable to the poor at prices similar to those in the Botika. --NONIE REYES