HAGATNA, Guam—The Guam tourism office on Tuesday urged mayors from the Philippines to promote a two-way traffic for tourism between the Philippines and Micronesia by encouraging Filipino travelers to consider the region as their destination.

Jesse Leon Guerrero, vice chairman of Guam Visitors Bureau (GVB), cited data from the Philippine Tourism Authority indicating that many visitors to the Philippines are from Guam and the entire western Pacific region.

“All we need now is a reciprocal and commensurate amount of visitors to Guam and our region from the Philippines,” Leon Guerrero said at the First Annual Pacific Mayors Conference, which concluded at the Sheraton Laguna Guam Resort Tuesday.

The GVB executive said Philippine mayors can use their “maximum municipal empowerment” status to encourage their constituents to come to Guam, the Northern Marianas Islands, Palau, Micronesia and Marshall Islands, which, he said, offer the type of tourist attractions that “visitors from the Philippines can look forward to.”

More than 300 mayors from the Pacific region attended the two-day conference aimed at enhancing the regional networking efforts.

Each of the mayors, Leon Guerrero said, “represents the true voice of the people…that will be instrumental in both economic and tourism development.”

“You are truly the foundation from which any tourism destination must evolve from,” the GVB official told the conference delegates.

THE Philippines would do well to take a cue from China, which has been able to produce enough rice to feed its more than 1 billion population through massive planting of hybrid rice, said SL Agritech Corp. chairman Henry Lim.

THE New York-based Citi Group, one of the world’s largest financial-services firms, said the Philippines deserves more credit than Moody’s Investor Services has given it.

THE Japanese government and the national government are poised to operationalize the Philippines Water Revolving Fund (PWRF) that will allow local government units (LGUs) and government-owned and -controlled corporations (GOCCs) access to official development assistance (ODA) loans, according to the National Economic and Development Authority (Neda).

MALACAÑANG’S wish for early ratification of the Japan Philippines Economic Partnership Agreement (Jpepa) ran into another obstacle Wednesday after three senators voiced doubts on the legality of a proposal by foreign relations committee chairman Sen. Miriam Santiago for the Senate to vote for conditional concurrence to the controversial treaty.

DAVAO CITY—Swedish Ambassador Inger Ultvedt advised the Philippines to make governance transparent and accountable and put a brake to the sending of too many talented people abroad.

HAGATNA, Guam—The Guam tourism office on Tuesday urged mayors from the Philippines to promote a two-way traffic for tourism between the Philippines and Micronesia by encouraging Filipino travelers to consider the region as their destination.

THE slowing world economy and rising inflation will be the major hurdles that Philippine businesses will deal with in 2008. This, according to Samie Lim, president of the Philippine Chamber of Commerce and Industry (PCCI) who spoke at the launching this week of the book  Whither the Philippines in the 21st Century in Makati City.

CEMENT literally is a major “building block” both of the ancient and modern times.

The  Assyrians and Babylonians used cement in the form of clay, and the Egyptians advanced to the discovery of lime and gypsum mortar as a binding agent for building structures such as the pyramids.