DAVAO CITY—Local chief executives in Mindanao will meet their counterparts in the four-nation East Asean Growth Area (Eaga)  to formalize their role in the subregional grouping and to ask their chief ministers or presidents to allow them to forge direct-trade arrangements.

Representatives from the Confederation of Governors, City and Municipal Mayors and Presidents of Leagues of Provinces and Municipalities in Mindanao (Confed) will sit down with governors and mayors in a side event later this month of the Senior Officials and Ministers Meeting (SOMM) of the Eaga. The growth area is made up of Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines (BIMP).

South Cotabato Gov.  Daisy Avance-Fuentes, who is also president of the Confed, said the LGU Forum would be held in her province’s capital, Koronadal City, and would get the nod of the forum to formalize themselves into a regular body in the BIMP-Eaga structure.

“The local governments wanted to be formally recognized as a venue for partnership with the business sector in the BIMP,” she told the BusinessMirror Tuesday. “They have been looked upon to give favorable environment to encourage trade.”

“To promote trade, for example, local governments are usually being asked to prepare the tourism site, to provide the conducive business environment and the appropriate policy,” she said.

She said local government officials from the backwater regions of the four countries started to meet last year in an LGU forum in Kota Kinabalu, Malaysia, and decided to meet again this year at the side of the SOMM to be held here.

“If a certain town or province in one country, like Malaysia, for instance, wanted a supply of rubber which my province could provide, why not allow us to make direct bilateral arrangements? Anyway, it would be us, governors, who would be doing business,” she said.

The normal process would usually involve the prime ministers or the presidents talking and approving the agreement and would be brought down to the provinces or towns for implementation. “If that is the case, we should be allowed to hold informal talks and make bilateral agreements,” Fuentes said.

ALIGNED with its thrust of expanding its business and operations outside of Thailand, PTT Philippines Corp. (PTTPC) has offered to the Philippine National Oil Co. (PNOC) to come up with a feasibility study on developing a gas pipeline from Batangas to Manila (BatMan-1) and Bataan to Manila (BatMan-2).

THE Philippine Economic Zone Authority (Peza) has already exceeded its full-year goal of generating P100 billion in fresh investments in 2007 as it approved P109 billion worth of new projects after the first three quarters of the year.

THE National Development Co. (NDC) will float P4.6 billion worth of bonds on behalf of the Light Rail Transit Authority (LRTA) to partly finance the construction of the North Extension Project worth P6.27 billion.

THE Philippines has imposed a temporary ban on the entry of chicken products, as well as domestic and wild birds and other poultry products from Saskatchewan, Canada, following reports of an avian influenza (AI) outbreak there.

IF you can’t lick them, crack them.

Honda Philippines Inc. (HPI), in coordination with its principal Honda Motor Co. Ltd. (HMC), destroyed on Wednesday 22 fake Honda general-purpose engines at the De La Salle University, Bacolod premises, in place of a motion to withdraw seized articles for destruction it filed before the Regional Trial Court of Bacolod City in June.

DAVAO CITY—Local chief executives in Mindanao will meet their counterparts in the four-nation East Asean Growth Area (Eaga)  to formalize their role in the subregional grouping and to ask their chief ministers or presidents to allow them to forge direct-trade arrangements.

THE world will celebrate World Standards Day on October 14, but the country observed it much earlier as the 33rd National Standards Week was celebrated from October 8  to 14.