MDGs: Las Piñas pushes school reforms despite lack of funds, teachers

JPEPA: ‘Unconstitutional’ on 15 counts yet…

Posted by: Alecks P. Pabico | May 14, 2008 at 4:46 pm
Filed under: Congress Watch, Governance, In the News

This post was written by Ivory delos Trinos, a senior AB Journalism student of St. Mary’s University in Bayombong, Nueva Vizcaya. She is earning her summer internship credits with the PCIJ.

THE Senate’s ratification of the Japan-Philippines Economic Partnership Agreement (JPEPA) is not likely to push through until, possibly, this August. This was after Senator Miriam Defensor Santiago decided to defer her sponsorship of the controversial treaty to await the results of the exchange of notes between foreign affairs secretary Alberto Romulo and Japanese Ambassador to Manila Makoto Katsura.

The renegotiation, citizens’ groups however warned, will not mend the irregularities innate to JPEPA. “The proposed side notes only seek to fix the constitutional problems of the agreement,” said Magkaisa Junk JPEPA Coalition (MJJC) legal counsel Golda Benjamin. “The economic problems are grave.”

The JPEPA, which was signed by President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo and Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi in September 2006 in Helsinki, is said to be unconstitutional in at least 15 of its provisions.

Santiago, chair of the Senate committee on foreign relations, proposed a “conditional concurrence” to rectify the shortcomings of the treaty. Along with Senator Mar Roxas, who chairs the Senate committee on trade and commerce, she has recommended a resolution adopting their joint committee reports recommending the said conditional concurrence.

Two-thirds of the Senate is needed for the JPEPA to come into force. The Japanese parliament already ratified it in late 2006.

The exchange of notes, according to Santiago, would contain the same 15 conditions in her proposed resolution for conditional concurrence to ensure that the treaty abides by the Philippine Constitution. Santiago’s proposal reads as follows:

Read more…

1987 constitution, arroyo administration, japan, japan philippines economic partnership agreement, philippines, senate

MDGs: Maguindanao, RP fall behind key indicators for education

Posted by: Alecks P. Pabico | May 14, 2008 at 12:09 am
Filed under: Governance, PCIJ Investigative Reports

IN October 2007, the United Nations marked the midpoint of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) that governments across the world ratified and pledged to fulfill until 2015. The Philippines and over a hundred other nations have committed to realize the MDG targets that, among others, seek to reduce by half the number of poor citizens and provide basic education for all.

However, our latest three-part series shows that the Arroyo administration is falling behind all key indicators of progress in a most strategic goal: education.

In faraway Maguindanao and nearby Las Piñas, more children are failing to enroll and stay in school, and the ratio of students to teachers, classrooms and books is getting worse. These problems gain more urgency as schools start preparing for the opening of the new schoolyear in the next fortnight.

Read on at pcij.org.

arroyo administration, las piñas, maguindanao, mdgs, millennium development goals, philippines

Postscript to a long-overdue legislation

Posted by: Alecks P. Pabico | May 12, 2008 at 10:28 am
Filed under: i Report Features, Public Health, Congress Watch, In the News

FINALLY, Congress ratified the bicameral conference committee-approved draft of the long-awaited law that promises to ensure access to affordable, quality medicines by majority of poor Filipinos. The legislative measure, called the “Universally Accessible Cheaper and Quality Medicines Act of 2008,” was even billed as a Labor Day gift to workers, but none of that materialized as it awaits to this day the signature of the President for it to formally come into force.

To be sure though, the bill’s approval has not been an easy one, attesting to the high-stakes political and economic interests involved in its crafting. A piece of legislation certified urgent by the Arroyo administration since 2001, the bill only came close to being enacted into law in the last three years, the last time being just before the 13th Congress adjourned in June 2007 with the House of Representatives failing to pass its version on third and final reading for a dubious lack of quorum.

This time, it took the bicam panel more than three months to come up with a compromise version that was most acceptable to its members, who had clashed over the bill’s more contentious issues, particularly the House of Representatives’s “generics only” provision and later, its proposal to create a drug price regulatory board which had threatened to delay its passage even more.

Back in January, after both the House and the Senate passed their respective versions of the proposed law late last year, their principal authors ― Senator Mar Roxas (Liberal Party) and Iloilo Representative Ferjenel Biron (Kampi) ― were even optimistic about the ease by which they would be able to harmonize the two drafts. After all, they claimed, both bills bore similar provisions, particularly those that seek amendments to Republic Act 8293, or the Intellectual Property Code of the Philippines.

Yet what proved to be the single biggest hurdle was the provision in House Bill 2844 that proposed that only the generic names of medicines appear on medical, dental, and veterinary prescriptions. This raised a howl among doctors who even threatened to declare a “hospital holiday” should the lawmakers refuse to take out such a provision.

Read more…

affordable medicines, bicameral conference committee, doha declaration, drug price regulatory board, generics act, pharmaceutical industry, philippines, trips agreement

No cure for costly medicines? Draft law affirms patent rights of drug firms

Posted by: Alecks P. Pabico | May 12, 2008 at 1:08 am
Filed under: i Report Features, Public Health, Congress Watch, In the News

PRESIDENT Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo is expected to sign into law this week the recently ratified cheaper medicines bill, which promises to bring down the prohibitive cost of drugs and medicines in the country.

Long awaited by the public, the bill had languished in Congress for almost a decade, its recent approval even bogged down by intense lobbying and debates in the bicameral conference committee over the “generics-only” provision and a proposed price-regulation board. In the end, public-health advocates, legal experts, even some legislators say the final version of the “Universally Accessible Cheaper and Quality Medicines Act of 2008” was severely watered down, while others acknowledge that it sets down policies they can live with.

But as the PCIJ reports, drug companies may challenge the law every step of the way. And with the battle now shifting to the drafting of its implementing rules and regulations, particularly vulnerable provisions are the Intellectual Property Code amendments that, critics say, legislators had apparently failed to scrutinize more closely.

Public-health advocates like lawyer Elpidio Peria feel that the IP Code amendments, though less contentious and controversial, were the more important provisions that unfortunately took a backseat, obscured by the “simplistic debates” on price regulation and the Generics Act amendments.

An associate of the Third World Network that had supported the Senate version of the bill, Peria says the bicam debates “only proved the esoteric nature of intellectual property, which makes it dangerous to be left to lawyers and policymakers.”

Likely to face challenges from pharmaceutical companies in court, he says, are the draft law’s “watered-down version on the matter of international exhaustion of patent rights, weak early working or Bolar provision, and government-use provisions with TRIPS-plus features [high levels of intellectual property protection not found in the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) Agreement] in it.” Another problematic amendment is a new section regarding the grant of a “special” compulsory license.

His advise to fellow advocates: “The IP Code amendments will now have to be scrutinized closely so that its imperfections might be augmented by the IRR.”

Read on at pcij.org.

affordable medicines, bicameral conference committee, doha declaration, generics act, intellectual property code, patents, pharmaceutical industry, philippines, third world network, trips agreement

Deceit, reprisal stalk referendum in Burma

Posted by: Tita Valderama | May 11, 2008 at 2:49 pm
Filed under: Cross Border, In the News

MANDALAY, Myanmar — It was first scheduled for May 10 — a referendum on the military-sponsored constitution that was hailed as a democratic step to a possible change of government leaders in 2010. Most groups opposed to the military junta have encouraged vigorous public participation in the electoral exercise.

While they are expecting for the best scenario of having a resounding “no” vote, these pro-democracy and ethnic groups are preparing for the worst scenario that the military regime will come up with a “forced yes” vote.

	Men prepare to leave the public plaza after a public campaigning by the military for a ‘yes’ vote in Saturday’s referendum on the Constitution. [photo by Tita Valderama]

Last Tuesday, the government announced that it was resetting to May 24 the referendum in at least 40 townships in Yangon that were seriously ravaged by tropical cyclone Nagris over the weekend.

Strangely, the draft constitution seeks, among other things, to change the country’s name from the “Federal Union of Myanmar” to the “Democratic Union of Myanmar.”

Every electoral exercise in the Philippines have always been presaged by popular cynicism, by widespread suspicion that the results would be marred by cheating and fraud. The story finds parallels here. Anti-regime groups here and elsewhere strongly doubt the credibility of the upcoming balloting, with the military employing various measures to deceive, intimidate and bribe the electorate to cast a “yes” vote.

“If the referendum is held free and fair, the regime will lose,” said Zin Linn, information officer of the National League for Democracy, Myanmar’s biggest political party that won in the 1990 general elections that the junta refused to recognize.

Read more…

aung san suu kyi, burma, constitution, military junta, nagris, referendum

COA’s underused documents

Posted by: Alecks P. Pabico | May 8, 2008 at 11:04 pm
Filed under: Governance, Paper Chase

This post was written by Aura Marie P. Dagcutan and Hannah L. Nepomuceno, senior mass communication students who are earning their summer internship credits with the PCIJ.

FOR ordinary Filipino taxpayers who wonder where and how the government spends their hard-earned money, the Commission on Audit (COA) reports are either a reality check or a cryptic message.

Every year, the constitutionally-mandated state auditing firm comes out with audit reports of all government agencies, including government-owned or -controlled corporations. The reports, which are available from the COA Central Office and also downloadable from its website, inform the public of the “cumulative allotments, obligations incurred, total disbursements, unobligated and unexpected balances of allotments distributed by province or city, and total amounts spent by each department, bureau, and office” in the government.

However, their availability appears not to be reason enough to encourage people to browse, read, and much less understand the documents that could serve as a clue, or a veritable road map, in uncovering the seemingly endless string of corruption cases that pervades almost every government office in this country.

In 2007, the Philippines ranked 131st out of 163 countries in the Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index, an annual survey that measures the degree to which corruption is perceived to exist among a country’s public officials and politicians. For two consecutive years, the country has also been deemed Asia’s most corrupt economy, according to the surveys done by the Hong Kong-based Political and Economic Risk Consultancy.

At a symposium held the other day to mark COA’s 109th anniversary, its newly nominated chairman, Reynaldo Villar, thus declared: “We should create an environment totally free of corruption in our ranks, and in the government.”

Read more…

audit reports, commission on audit, corruption, philippines

Burma in tatters

Posted by: Alecks P. Pabico | May 6, 2008 at 10:25 pm
Filed under: PCIJ Image Galleries, Cross Border, In the News

THE PCIJ’s Tita Valderama was among five journalists from Southeast Asia who were able to enter Myanmar (still Burma to pro-democracy groups) from Bangkok on tourist visas for five days last week from May 1 to 5. They happened to be in Yangon (Rangoon) a day before, and two days after, the “killer” cyclone wrought so much damage and disaster.

By Monday night, the death toll was reported to have climbed to at least 10,000, even as the former capital is now littered with fallen trees and electric posts. Several houses and hospitals lost roofs while thousands, or maybe millions, of poor people in about 30 coastal villages have been rendered homeless.

Below are images Tita surreptitiously took using her digital camera, an act that was not without its dangers given that the military government does not allow foreign journalists to enter the country.

Read her first-person account of the tragedy.

See also op-ed piece of Roby Alampay, SEAPA executive director.

burma, cyclone, myanmar

Climate change to worsen already low food production in Asia — experts

Posted by: Pamela Ordoveza | May 6, 2008 at 2:05 pm
Filed under: Cross Border, Environment Watch, Governance, In the News

EXTREME changes in the weather pose yet another threat to farmers in the wake of the impending rice crisis. This was the warning raised by experts in a recently held conference by the East Asia Rice Working Group (EARWG).

Philippine Atmospheric, Geophysical, Astronomical Services Administration (PAGASA) climate data chief Lourdes Tibig explained that climate change — global warming in particular — increases the risk of crop damage. This, she said, is one of the major causes of low productivity in agriculture.

Climate change directly results in the higher incidence of flood, drought, and rising temperature, which can later on cause pest infestation. Changes in the weather, Tibig also said, affect water availability and soil fertility, which are both essential in rice production.

According to Dr. Anni Mitin of the Southeast Asian Council for Food Security and Fair Trade (Seacon), decline in crop yield creates a domino effect, which, in the long run, brings more and more people at risk of hunger and food insecurity.

View Dr. Mitin’s presentation on the various adaptation strategies of Asian countries to climate change.

Mitin explained that low harvests reduce the marginal growth domestic product from the agriculture sector, which then causes fluctuations in world market prices and changes in trade systems.

Read more…

asia, climate change, global warming, philippines, rice