Japan activates disaster-contingency grant, satellite-comms system, new AI platform

ON August 8, Ambassador Kazuhiko Koshikawa of Japan signed the exchange of notes with Secretary of Foreign Affairs Enrique A. Manalo to formalize a loan facility and a grant project under Japan’s official development assistance, or ODA: the Post Disaster Stand-by Loan Phase 3 (PDSL 3) and the Philippine Coast Guard’s (PCG) Satellite Data Communication System (SDCS).

PDSL 3: This ¥30-billion loan seeks to support swift recovery in the aftermath of natural and health-related disasters by providing a quick-disbursing budgetary grant for the Philippines’s calamity-response programs. Under highly concessional terms, the loan’s repayment period is set at 30 years after a grace period of 10 years, with a fixed interest rate of 0.01 percent per annum.

The Japanese government started this budgetary support in 2013, as it helped Filipino families recover lost income and rebuild their lives from the devastating effects of Ty-

MANILA Economic and Cultural Office chairperson Silvestre H. Bello urged the government to provide a sizable piece of land to graduates of Agriculture studies from universities overseas.

This took special relevance, as the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office recently feted Filipino scholars who recently finished their graduate and postgraduate courses in Taiwan. Immediately after, Bello suggested that they should be allocated some 3 hectares to 5 hectares of agricultural area, so that they could transfer and apply their learning at the home front.

The Meco chair made this appeal as he revealed that out of 122 Filipino agriculture studies scholars produced by the Republic of Taiwan from the past years, only two returned to the Philippines. Farming in the former, he observed, is powered by machine and equipment, and is hardly a manual endeavor. Compared locally where a hectare’s output is between 80 to 100 cavans, Taiwan can come up with thrice as much, or about 280.

He even described the fisheries sector centered in Kaohsiung