Corn ‘tinikling’ A woman farmer in Santa Lucia, Ilocos Sur, gingerly steps across the corn she is sorting before selling the good ones to private dealers for P12 a kilo. Sen. Edgardo Angara, chairman of the Senate agriculture panel, is pushing the government to redirect huge funds away from the National Food Authority‘s resource-draining activities to providing easy credit to corn and rice farms that need to be upgraded, thus boosting production. --MAURICIO VICTA

IF the $100-per-barrel cost of oil sent the Arroyo administration in such a frenzy that it called an energy summit in only three weeks, imagine what the next administration will do if oil actually hits $225 per barrel after 2010.

According to a new study from Canada-based investment-banking firm CIBC World Markets Inc., oil prices will surge to $115 per barrel this year and continue rising to $225 per barrel in 2012.

AFTER finding legal flaws in the controversial Japan-Philippines Economic Partnership Agreement (Jpepa), the Senate has given Foreign Affairs Secretary Alberto Romulo time to work out a side agreement with the Japanese government to cure those flaws.

Thus, sponsorship speeches for the bilateral economic pact have been placed on hold, and the interlude is expected to give opponents of the Jpepa time to line up more protest activities.

THE shortfall in the supply of information-technology (IT) professionals will be one of the greatest obstacles to the Philippine information and communications technology (ICT) industry’s growth in the coming years.

“BPOs [business-process outsourcing companies] have been setting up shop in the Philippines and this has been putting pressure on the availability of qualified IT personnel,” said Rodell Garcia, CIO of Globe Telecommunications. He was speaking Friday at the ICT and Sustainable Development Conference sponsored by De La Salle University.

THE Philippines trails five other countries in a recent poll by the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania as choice destination of American companies offshoring their businesses.

The poll, part of a research on the implications of outsourcing on the US job market, shows some 26.52 companies in the United States citing the Philippines as the site of their offshoring business.

THE House of Representatives may defer ratification of the bicameral conference committee report of the proposed Cheaper Medicines Act until House leaders are fully satisfied that the law will truly guarantee cheaper medicines.

Speaker Prospero Nograles said this days after several legislators assailed the “drastic weakening” of the measure with the removal by the Senate contingent of the proposed drug-price regulatory board and the “generics only” provisions.

THE job is considered one of the toughest within the Department of Finance (DOF) and has proven very costly for its most recent occupant.

And yet, five people want former finance undersecretary Gaudencio Mendoza’s seat as chief of revenue operations, the one that cost him the job soon after ruling on an excise-tax case that caused British American Tobacco (BAT) to withdraw a job-creating $25-million production line.

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See those flippers? Mondex, a five-year-old Chihuahua, poses as he walks the aisle dressed as a scuba diver during a dog show at a mall on Sunday. Mondex bagged first place in the fashion-show category. --AP