Category: Philippines Daily Inquirer

The Budget Amendments Review Subcommittee (BARSc) of the House of Representatives on Thursday approved an additional P16 billion to the Department of Agriculture budget in amendments for next year.

The move aims to further support farmers, fisherfolk, and the agriculture sector and strengthen programs to prepare them for the looming super El Niño.

Under the P7.2-trillion National Expenditure Program (NEP) for 2027, the budget allocated to DA was around P198.45 billion.

The subcommittee, composed of select lawmakers from major political parties and the minority bloc, began deliberations on the proposed amendments to the budget for next year.

Among the eight line items introduced by the subcommittee includes an additional P500 million to the expanded fertilizer assistance program, with a current budget of P14,443,499,000.

The chairperson of the Committee on Agriculture and Food, Rep. Wilfrido Mark Enverga, also moved to allocate funding to the Solar Pump Irrigation Project that was initially not included in the 2027 NEP budget, amounting to P125 million.

The chairperson also allotted P105,000,000 to the provision of hybrid solar-powered ice plants program, in a bid to support air-to-water technology for the coastal and remote fishing communities.

‘In fact, they are already piloting two areas for the solar ice plants, particularly using air-to-water technology. So these are highly potential opportunities for the fishery sector,’ Enverga explained when asked about the pilot program.

A budget request for the implementation of the Agri-Transport and Support Infrastructure Projects under DA amounting to P150,000,000 was also presented.

The chairperson said that the cable car systems would be cheaper for high-value crops being planted in the mountainous areas, compared to the high costs of farm-to-market roads.

‘So rather than building costly farm-to-market roads, these would be trams that would transport goods from one mountain to another, which would be much cheaper and more economical for our production system in high-value crops,’ he said.

An additional P4,960,224,000 was also proposed to be included in the P16 billion budget to farm-to-market road programs.

Meanwhile, an additional P500,000,000 under the Philippine Fisheries Development Authority was also introduced for the construction, rehabilitation, and improvement of fish ports. Under the 2027 NEP, it has an allocation of P2,100,000,000.

Enverga also proposed an additional P100,000,000 for high-value crops to the existing P1,700,308,000 budget.

House committee on appropriations chairperson Rep. Mikaela Suansing proposed P10,000,000,000 for the Presidential Assistance to Farmers and Fisherfolk to ensure the agriculture sector is prepared for the impact of the super El Niño.

‘Another measure we wish to take to ensure our 2027 budget is fully prepared for a ‘super El Niño’ -is to allocate funds for the Presidential Assistance to Farmers and Fisherfolk,’ she said.

More than 1,200 bamboo culms were planted at a National Greening Program site at the Talaytay Protected Landscape in the Aurora town of Dinalungan as part of efforts to restore degraded forest areas.

In a statement on Thursday, the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) in Central Luzon said the planting activity led by its community office in Casiguran town was held in Barangay Dibaraybay in observance of Philippine Bamboo Month last September.

The Talaytay Protected Landscape covers about 3,526 hectares, straddling Dinalungan and Casiguran, and protects the Talaytay River watershed.

It was originally established as a watershed forest reserve in 1990 before it was declared a protected landscape in 2000 under Proclamation No. 283.

DENR-Casiguran community head Ariel Mendoza said the National Greening Program promotes bamboo propagation because the plant helps restore degraded lands, absorb carbon dioxide, and reduce soil erosion.

The activity drew more than 85 participants from the Dibaraybay barangay government, Talaytay Protected Landscape Occupants Association Inc., Bantay Kalikasan ng Dinalungan Aurora Inc., and the Casiguran municipal environment office

Vice Ganda, Mon Confiado, Michael V., Nadine Lustre and more Filipino actors and shows are set to represent the country at the 2026 Asian Academy Creative Awards after clinching national wins in different categories.

Vice Ganda earned the Best Actor in a Leading Role honor for her role in ‘Call Me Mother,’ while Confiado earned the Best Actor in a Supporting Role accolade for his performance in ‘Salvageland.’

Michael V. won the Best Actor/Actress in a Comedy Role for ‘Pepito Manaloto: The Story Continues.’ Lustre, for her part, earned the Best Actress in a Leading Role award for her portrayal in ‘Love, Siargao,’ while the film emerged as Best Original Production by a Streamer.

Moises Zee was also honored in the Best Cinematography (Fiction) category for ‘Drug War: A Conspiracy of Silence,’ while ‘I’mPerfect’ director Sigrid Bernardo earned Best Direction (Feature Film).

Other national winners include Onat Diaz (‘The Silent Noise’) for Best Direction (Scripted); Lawrence Ang (‘Drug War Conspiracy of Silence’) for Best Editing; Rico Hizon (‘Rated R: The Rico Hizon Podcast’) for Best Entertainment Host; Charms Espina (PTV News Tonight) for Best Factual Presenter; and Jonathan Guillermo and Shugo Praico (‘Drug War: A Conspiracy of Silence’) for Best Screenplay.

Other notable national wins were secured by Filipino films and TV shows including ‘The Voice Kids Philippines’ 2025 – Grand Finale Episode for Best Adaptation of an Existing Format (Non-scripted); ‘It’s Okay To Not Be Okay’ for Best Adaptation of an Existing Format (Scripted); ’58th’ for Best Animation; ‘Bubble Gang’ for Best Comedy; ‘The Atom Araullo Specials: Baby maker’ for Best Documentary One-off; ‘Drawing on Water – The History of the West Philippine Sea’ for Best Documentary History; ‘Reporter’s Notebook: Saving Babies’ for Best Documentary Series; ‘The Silent Noise’ for Best Drama Series; ‘Kontrabida Academy’ for Best Feature Film; ‘Drew’s Travels: Boracay Through the Eyes of the Locals’ for Best Lifestyle Program; ‘Stars On The Floor’ for Best Music or Dance Program; ‘One at Heart, Jessica Soho: Tacloban School Shooting’ for Best News Program; and ‘The Master Cutter’ launch trailer for Best Promo or Trailer.

The national winners from the Philippines are set to compete in their respective categories against winners from Singapore, Japan, Malaysia, China, Indonesia, Taiwan, Thailand, and other countries.

The 2026 Grand Final Winners will be revealed during the awards ceremony in Singapore on Dec. 3.

The Philippines hurdled the second round of voting for the 2026 Miss Grand International pageant’s ‘Country’s Power of the Year’ online poll, and is moving on to Round 3.

But if in the first two rounds the public had 48 hours to vote, this time the voting period will only run for 24 hours. The third round of voting started on Wednesday, Sept. 30, at 9 P.M. (PST), and will close on Thursday, Oct. 1, at 9 P.M. (PST).

What also makes the third round a tighter race for the qualifiers is the removal of the social media component for voting. Votes will only be accepted via the Miss Grand International pageant’s official voting portal.

And with the elimination of the social media component, there will no longer be any free votes for the pubilc. Every vote is worth THB35 (approximately P65). The pageant announced that the votes will also be counted for the race for ‘Miss Popular Vote.’

Reina Filipinas Angelica Lopez is representing the Philippines in this year’s competition. The country advanced to Round 2 of voting by ranking third in the list of 40 qualifiers.

The Top 40 ladies for the ‘Country’s Power of the Year’ voting were split into four equal groups, and only the Top 2 ladies from each group made it to Round 3. At the end of the round, only four ladies will move on to Round 4.

Joining the Philippines in the Top 8 for the voting for ‘Country’s Power of the Year’ from Group C was Guatemala. The qualifiers from Group A were Tanzania and Chile, Ecuador and Pakistan for Group B, and Vietnam and Paraguay for Group D.

The Philippines won ‘Country’s Power of the Year’ in last year’s competition, with Filipino delegate Emma Tiglao eventually claiming the crown at the end of the competition.

Reina Filipinas Pres. Jojo Bragais is campaigning vigorously to raise enough votes for the Philippines to move on to Round 4. He has tapped his business contacts and friends, and appealed to the pageant titleholders that he has sponsored in the past, to help the country’s campaign.

The 2026 Miss Grand International pagant is taking place in Thailand. The ‘Grand Final’ will be staged at MGI Hall in Bangkok on Oct. 10. Seventy-six delegates from around the world are competing this year.

Pangasinan province’s economy grew by 4.3 percent in 2025 and maintained its lead in the Ilocos region, posting P408.45 billion in economic output as poverty incidence dropped to 8.6 percent.

This was based on the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) and the Department of Economy, Planning and Development (DEPDev) during the 2025 Provincial Product Accounts Dissemination Forum in Binmaley town on Tuesday (Sept. 29).

Pangasinan’s output rose by P16.83 billion from 2024’s P391.62 billion. It accounted for 53.1 percent of the Ilocos Region’s economy and contributed 2.30 percentage points to the region’s 4.5 percent growth.

‘Poverty incidence likewise declined from 16.1 percent in 2023 to 8.6 percent in 2025. The number of Pangasinan residents living below the poverty threshold fell to 277,340 from 512,690 – a reduction of 235,350 individuals,’ the Pangasinan government said in a statement.

It cited provincial programs supporting livelihood and basic services, including corporate farming, Kadiwa activities, employment facilitation, expanded access to education through the Pangasinan Polytechnic College, and the modernization of provincial hospitals

Lawyer Kathy Baldonado of the Davao City Register of Deeds takes her oath as a prosecution witness in Article II of Vice President Sara Duterte’s impeachment trial, which covers alleged unexplained wealth, false SALNs and business interests. In her offered testimony, Baldonado is expected to testify on a property registered to Duterte’s husband, Manases Carpio, in Barangay Matina, Davao City, reportedly valued at P6 million, which the prosecution says could help establish an alleged undeclared asset in Duterte’s SALN

Ifugao, home of the World Heritage-inscribed rice terraces, has been designated as an emerging ‘growth pole’ alongside Cordillera region’s rice granary Kalinga province, because of their improved economic performance, the Department of Economy, Planning and Development (DepDev) said during a briefing on Tuesday.

The province has been in the spotlight recently because of a pitch made to Malacañang in August by urban planner and architect Felino Palafox Jr. to generate a comprehensive master plan for preserving the rice terraces. Often regarded as 2,000-year-old structures, recent archaeological findings place these still thriving terraced rice farms to be between 400 and 500 years.

The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) had also been collaborating with the National Commission on Indigenous Peoples (NCIP) and the Department of Environment and Natural Resources to jumpstart biodiversity conservation by harmonizing the economic plans for Ifugao ancestral domains with the concepts of wildlife preservation.

Baguio-centric growth

The Ifugao economy grew by 5.4 percent in 2025 and has reflected the fastest growth rate in the Cordillera next to Baguio City, said Jose Dado, DepDev chief economist for the Cordillera.

It was followed by Kalinga’s growth performance of 4.9 percent which puts them in a three-tiered growth scenario led by the ‘competitive urban core’ of Baguio and Benguet province, which is a major supplier of salad vegetables to Metro Manila and parts of Luzon.

The provinces of Apayao, Abra and Mountain Province have been designated as ‘frontier economies.’

Dado reconfigured the strategic development thrusts of these mountain provinces given their huge economic disparity with Baguio, considered the regional capital.

Baguio grew by 5.6 percent last year, which reflected a slowdown from 5.9 percent in 2024. But the city represents nearly half of the Cordillera’s 4.4-percent growth in 2025, said Aldrin Federico Bahit Jr., chief statistician of the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) in the region. The value of Baguio’s gross domestic product (GDP) in 2025, or the cost of goods and services it produced last year, was P188.89 billion.

This 117-year-old mountain resort city serves as a highly urbanized travel and education hub for the Cordillera and the larger northern Luzon.

‘The P478,956 per capita GDP of the city of Baguio was the highest among all the [local] economies in the region. This was higher than the per capita GDP of the Cordillera Administrative Region (CAR) which stood at P207,589,’ Bahit said when he presented Baguio’s 2025 provincial product account at the briefing.

‘The city was the sole economy in CAR that exceeded the regional per capita GDP. The province of Benguet ranked second in terms of per capita GDP in the region (with P181,866),’ he added.

The per capita GDP estimates how much every resident contributed to economic growth, and reveals a ‘widening gap and disparity among Cordillera provinces,’ Dado said.

Bahit agreed, saying policymakers will need to take note of the demographics on the ground no matter how good the economic performance has been.

For example, the 2024 community-based monitoring system of Ifugao revealed an employment rate of only 40.40 percent across its 11 municipalities to include the rice terraces host towns of Banaue, Mayoyao, Hungduan and Kiangan, said Eric Aplosen, PSA statistician for Ifugao, in an online briefing on Sept. 25. He said 74.22 percent of the province’s labor force are farmers.

The Ifugao planning office puts the labor force tally at 89,869 residents, of whom 82,103 are employed, 7,766 are unemployed while 25,952 are underemployed. Because most terrace farms are family-owned, the data would not measure informal labor arrangements nor the work required by a rice culture that dictates how and what to plant on these ancient farms.

According to a working draft submitted by the UNDP, NCIP and the Ifugao government for funding, only 77.4 percent of rice and corn farmers have been earning an annual P20,000 or less from terrace paddies called ‘payao.

Less than 5 percent of them earn more than P40,000 annually, to explain a disturbing trend of terrace farms being abandoned.

A 31-year-old fisher from Maasin City, Southern Leyte was rescued on Wednesday, Sept.30, after his pump boat suffered engine failure while he was fishing in the waters off Limasawa Island, authorities said.

The fisher, a resident of Barangay Combado, had been out of communication with his family for more than 12 hours when the Coast Guard Sub-Station (CGS)-Southern Leyte and the Maasin City Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Office (CDRRMO) launched a search and rescue operation at around 9 a.m.

The fisher was located at about 10:30 a.m. by another fisher from Macrohon, Southern Leyte, who found him in the waters off Limasawa.

He was found dehydrated but otherwise in good condition, according to the rescuers.

Authorities said the fisher’s pump boat, described as white and red, bearing a Greenland flag and marked ‘BETH,’ had been last known to be operating near the waters of Loay, Bohol.

The CGS-Southern Leyte and CDRRMO Water Search and Rescue teams immediately deployed CDRRMO water assets after receiving the report and proceeded toward the fisherman’s last known location.

The search operation was coordinated with CGS-Bohol, local fishers, and neighboring local government units in the area.

Authorities later determined that the fisher’s boat had suffered engine failure, leaving him unable to return to shore on his own.

The boat was safely towed to shore in Macrohon, while the rescued fisher was brought back to Maasin City, where he was reunited with his family.

CDRRMO responders conducted an initial physical assessment and found that he did not require further medical assistance

Two property registrars testified on Thursday that two parcels of land in the Davao Region purchased by Vice President Sara Duterte’s spouse, Atty. Manases Carpio, were not reflected in the vice president’s statement of assets, liabilities, and net worth (SALN).

Davao City Register of Deeds IV Kathy Florence Baldonado and Samal Deputy Register of Deeds III Marco Pineda took the witness stand to present documents in relation to Carpio’s properties in the region.

Matina land

Baldonado testified that based on the transfer certificate of title, Carpio supposedly purchased a 379-square-meter parcel of land located in Juna Subd., Matina Crossing, Talomo, Davao City, Davao del Sur.

The deed of sale states that the land was sold to Carpio on July 2, 2024 for P6 million pesos.

‘Base po sa record na hawak ko, wala po sa 2025 (SALN)- wala pong nagmatch sa presyo at sa lugar at ang mode of acquisition ang nakalagay po sa 2025 ay construction at dito po sa aming dokumento ay deed of sale,’ Baldonado told the court.

(Based on the record I have, there is nothing in 2025 (SALN) – there is no match in the price and the location and the mode of acquisition is stated in 2025 as construction and here in our document it is deed of sale.)

Presiding officer Francis Escudero also declared before the court that after inspecting the SALN of Duterte, ‘[he did] not find this particular property as one of the real properties declared because we checked it against all of the declarations of the vice president.’

Defense lawyer Lindon Bacquel made a manifestation, saying it would be ‘erroneous’ for the impeachment court to not identify the same property in Duterte’s SALN.

‘The court must take mandatory judicial notice of the geographical divisions in the Philippines that Matina Crossing is also known as Brgy 74A, which is declared in the SALN,’ Bacquel added.

Later, Escudero clarified that the property was not found because the areas in the SALN are ‘too generic’ to identify.

But he continued: ‘There is a sale mentioned here as identified earlier.. of a parcel of land in 76A Davao City but the amount of acquisition is P10 million, and a sale of property in Dumoy Davao City but the sale is P2 million.’

On August 24, 2024, a real estate mortgage was executed by Carpio on the P6 million property ‘in favor of the Philippine Savings Bank’ for P8 million.

Samal Land

The same observation was made for another parcel of land measuring 751 square meters that Carpio supposedly purchased in Matanos, Island Garden City of Samal, Province of Davao del Norte.

According to Pineda, the records of the registry show that Carpio acquired the land on March 15, 2018 for P3,453,849.

Upon referencing the vice president’s SALN once again, Pineda said: ‘Nothing in this SALN perfectly matches the DOAS (Deed of Absolute Sale.)

Escudero referenced the 2019 SALN pointing out that Duterte declared two land purchases in Brgy. Aundanao, Igacos – one sold at P2 million in total and another at P1 million.

But Pineda said that both declarations, though coming close to the total amount paid for by Carpio, ‘does not match the deed of sale… in so far as this title is concerned there is only one parcel (of land) not two.’

Former police officer Rodulfo Gracioso Jr.’s polygraph examination showed ‘no deception indicated’ in his sworn affidavit in connection with the suitcases of cash he delivered to Vice President Sara Duterte.

According to the polygraph examination result, the findings of his polygraph showed ‘no specific physiological reactions indicative of deception.’

The examination was made to verify the truthfulness of his affidavit dated Sept. 14.

Gracioso underwent a lie detector test at the National Bureau of Investigation on Wednesday, Sept. 30, in relation with his statement where he claimed to have delivered suitcases of cash to Sara Duterte, former President Rodrgo Duterte, and Davao City 1st District Rep. Paolo Duterte.