In “an attempt to make the Philippines self-sufficient in salt production, a senior administration lawmaker Rep. Ron Salo of party-list Kabayan, authored and sponsored HB 1976. The Salo House Bill aims to revitalize the country’s salt industry through “comprehensive salt industry development program”.

HB 1976 mandates the Philippine government to provide technical. Physical and financial assistance to sea salt farmers, including artisanal salt farmers, to develop and improve their craft. Likewise, tasks the government to invest in the identification and construction of salt farms for lease to qualified salt farmers (individuals, cooperatives or corporations).

Rep. Salo attributes the country’s dependence on imported salt product by pointing out what he calls “an outdated policy regime, low quality control and product improvement, limited development of new production areas, unattractive business environment for small enterprises and lack of new investments.” He (Salo) is happy that key stakeholders supporting his Bill include the Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources (BFAR), Cooperative Development Authority (CDA) and Department of Science and Technology (DOST) as well as colleagues Reps. Richard Gomez (Leyte), Gerville Luistro (Batangas) and France Castro (ACT-party-list).

MY COMMENT:

As a marine biologist, I am well aware of the Philippines sea water area being an archipelagic country having 36,000 plus kilometers of shoreline, longer than that of continental USA – that can be utilized for massive salt production. And, therefore I find it ironic for our country to import 93 percent of its salt requirement. I have no information from a company whose top man told me about their salt-making project in Pangasinan?
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Many of my friends and colleagues who are now working in the United States keep on boasting about where they are now and what they have become, as though they are now in heaven. Some of them are enticing me to go there as though it is the best place to be.

But I am not at all impressed. I know a lot about Bible prophecies that, today, things are running from bad to worse, even in the US.

Yes, economic conditions just keep getting worse. Now that we have entered 2023, we find ourselves in high-inflation environments while economic activity is gradually slowing down. Just like in 2008, employers are conducting mass layoffs as a horrifying housing crash sweeps across that nation.

In the online magazine, Prophecy News Watch, we can read the following 15 recent facts that prove a massive economic meltdown is already happening right now:

1. Home sales have now fallen for 10 consecutive months.
2. Existing home sales are down 35.4 percent over the last 12 months, the largest year-over-year decline in existing home sales since the collapse of Lehman Brothers.
3. Homebuilder sentiment has now dropped for 12 consecutive months.
4. Home construction costs have risen more than 30 percent since the beginning of 2022.
5. The number of single-family housing unit permits has fallen for nine months in a row.
6. The Empire State Manufacturing Index has plunged “to a reading of negative 11.2 in December”.
7. In November, Americans witnessed the largest decline in retail sales that they have seen all year long.
8. Even the biggest names on Wall Street are starting to let workers go.
9. The Federal Reserve is admitting that the number of actual jobs in the United States has been overstated by over a million.
10. U.S. job cuts were 417 percent higher in November than they were during the same month a year ago.
11. A recent Wall Street Journal survey found that approximately two-thirds of all Americans expect the economy to get even worse next year.
12. A newly released Bloomberg survey covered that 70 percent of U.S. economists believe a recession is coming in 2023.
13. Inflation continues to spiral wildly out of control.
14. Overall, vegetable prices in the United States are more than 80 percent higher than they were at this same time last year.
15. Thanks to the rapidly rising cost of living, 63 percent of the U.S. population is now living paycheck to paycheck.

We may not understand all of these, but to desperately get inflation under control, the Federal Reserve has been dramatically increasing interest rates, causing the housing market to crash, but Fed officials insist that such short-term pain is necessary to tame inflation.

Given all this, I am not attracted to this Filipino dreamland anymore. The US is now too different from what it used to be. These countrymen who are boasting of their new-found social and economic status in this country are perhaps not reading news updates about what’s going on there, economically that is.