FRENCH ambassador to the Philippines Gerard Chesnel expressed hope that the Belgian passport firm FCO will win over its lone competitor Germany’s Bundesdrukerei on the P900-million electronic-passport project set to be implemented late this year.

Chesnel made the statement as the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) is set to come up with the final awards on the e-passport project this month.

“We are waiting for the result. It is a good competition. We hope that we [referring to the French-Belgian firm] will win,” said Chesnel in recent interview in Makati City.

The BSP, in coordination with the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA), shortlisted two European firms—FCO and Bundesdrukei—last month for the final bidding of the P900-million passport project.

Two other European firms—Alma Viva, the supplier of Italian passports, and GND company—have been eliminated by the BSP awards committee after conducting ocular visits and verified infrastructure and financial readiness.

The department was supposed to implement the machine-readable passport project in 2000 to replace the hand-scripted green passport through the Philippine-Thai company BCA International that won in a P1.2-billion passport deal through a build-operate-transfer scheme.

But Foreign Affairs Secretary Alberto Romulo rescinded the contract on December 9, 2005, after the firm failed to prove its financial capacity to implement the project.

The BCA sought injunction with the Supreme Court and initially won by restraining the implementation of the machine-readable project jointly undertaken by the BSP and DFA. But in March last year, the High Court lifted the restraining order that allowed the DFA to embark on the machine-readable passport project in the middle of last year.

THE Bureau of Agricultural Statistics (BAS) and the Philippine Rice Research Institute (Philrice) under the Department of Agriculture (DA) are conducting a survey of rice lands that were converted into other agricultural and nonagricultural purposes.

Despite recent pronouncements made by the government that it would step up its intervention in the domestic market to reduce the price of commercial rice, the latest monitor of the Bureau of Agricultural Statistics (BAS) shows that rice prices in Metro Manila continue to go up.

THE Department of Agriculture (DA) has improved its implementation of the $60-million Diversified Farm Income and Market Development, officials of the World Bank (WB) said.

THE Department of Energy (DOE) reported Tuesday that the country’s total oil import slightly increased last year compared with 2006 owing to the continuous surge in world oil prices.

FRENCH ambassador to the Philippines Gerard Chesnel expressed hope that the Belgian passport firm FCO will win over its lone competitor Germany’s Bundesdrukerei on the P900-million electronic-passport project set to be implemented late this year.

CLARK FREE PORT—Changi Airports International (CAI), developer and owner-operator of Singapore’s multiawarded Changi International Airport, is seriously considering developing the Diosdado Macapagal International Airport (DMIA) in a bid to make it the Philippines’ premier gateway.