Two legislators, Reps Eric Go Yap (Benguet) and Paolo Z Duterte (Davao City), alarmed by the smuggling of agri-fishery goods estimated at P667.5 million in 2019-2022, have co-authored House Bill 168 urging the Lower House committee on agriculture and food to conduct an investigation.

Accordingly, only P10 million worth of the smuggled items were apprehended. Added to this was another P1.99 billion worth of agricultural products in 542 raids conducted in 2019!
Yap and Duterte were quoted saying that “smuggling of agricultural products has been causing price distortion in the produce of Filipino farmers and defeats the efforts to increase farm production.

Smuggling activities have been active despite the creation of a Task Force to investigate the sudden proliferation of smuggled vegetables in the local market like carrots, ginger, onions and poultry products. The TF is composed of representatives from the Bureau Customs (BOC), Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) and the Bureau of Internal Revenue (BIR).

MY COMMENT:
Smuggling, likened to an incurable disease, has been in the country since time immemorial. While we do not profess being the only smugglers paradise, we abhor such reference! Unless eradicated fast enough (like corruption), attempts to inject fresh blood to the battered economy, is forecast to remain a dream.
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The last Automatic was my take on the rising oceans. It dwells on the anecdote of the sky falling. The Sky is Falling is an absurd belief that disaster is imminent. The term comes from a fable about a chicken who believes the sky is falling when an acorn falls on its head.
To me, however, this is a clear future danger that has proven to be imminent and certain, that is why I deemed it necessary that we must take a hard look into this phenomenon. We must take a long and analytical gaze into Sea Level Rising in the Philippines and plan, do act on mitigation actions.

The Philippine Daily Inquirer Article Urban Poor Struggle to Adapt as Rising Seas Threaten to Remap Metro Manila penned by Jhesse O. Enano disclosed that; The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported in August this year that the average global rate of sea level rise increased from 1.9 millimeters per year between 1971 and 2006 to 3.7mm between 2006 and 2018.

“Human influence was very likely the driver of these increases,” said the report, pointing to greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels among the main culprits.

With climate change-induced sea level rise, seawater is already invading some islands in the Visayas, while seawater intrusion is a looming threat to Metro Manila, home to 13 million people. In the Manila Bay area, the sea is rising by 12.13 mm per year, about four times the global average, according to a study by the Coastal Sea Level Rise Philippines Project (CSLR-Phil), which used tide gauges and satellite measurements.

Even the Department of Foreign Affairs raised this concern last June 14, 2021, on the occasion of the 21st Meeting of the United Nations Open-ended Informal Consultative Process on Oceans and the Law of the Sea. The Oscar M. Lopez Foundation had allotted a whole Scientific Study on the Rising of Seas. The World Bank in the Climate Change Knowledge Portal had warned the Philippines; Rising sea levels create not only stress on the physical coastline, but also on coastal ecosystems. Saltwater intrusions can be contaminating freshwater aquifers, many of which sustain municipal and agricultural water supplies and natural ecosystems. As global temperatures continue to warm, sea levels will keep rising for a long time because there is a substantial lag to reaching an equilibrium. The magnitude of the rise will depend strongly on the rate of future carbon dioxide emissions and future global warming, and the speed might increasingly depend on the rate of glacier and ice sheet melting.

On a personal note, I have seen the dreadful high tide at the Molle Pier here near the Grand Hotel, McDonald’s, and Mercado Publico in Tacloban City. Soon, when we are affected and when water creeps slowly to our homes, our streets, we remember these days when we are warned, reminded that indeed the Seas are rising slowly yet fearfully, it does so, certainly. We must therefore act now

THIS is what we should aspire for. This is what we are meant to be. Unless we become contemplative souls, there’s no way we can be with God who is everything to us. Without him, we can only be at best a joke, no matter how impressive our life and work can seem according to human and worldly standards.

We need to see to it that we should always feel the urge to pray, to engage with God, to be with him. If we do not feel that urge yet, let’s convince ourselves that we have something most important to work on. Thus, like the disciples of Christ, impressed by how Christ was to them, we should beg him to teach us how to pray. (cfr. Lk 11,1-4)

The Lord’s Prayer is the model prayer that we should learn by heart. We have to learn to discern the spirit behind its every expression and petition, since as the Compendium of the Catechism teaches us, this prayer is the “summary of the whole Gospel,” “the perfect prayer” that presents in the form of prayer the essential content of the Gospel. (579)
In the Church, this prayer is considered as the prayer “par excellence” that is handed on in Baptism to signify the new birth of the children of God into the divine life. (cfr. Compendium 581)

We have to understand that prayer is what keeps our love burning. That’s because it what keeps us always in contact with God who is the very essence of love. Prayer, therefore, should not be understood merely as some spiritual exercise that we have to learn to do at certain moments of the day only.

It has to be our very life itself. Everything in our life should be an act of prayer, including our sleeping. Our very consciousness, our breathing and heartbeat should be converted into prayer. This is what to be a contemplative spirit is.

We have to realize that contemplative life is a great need for us since it represents the full maturity of our consciousness. And as our radical connection with the very foundation of reality who is God, contemplative life is indispensable to us.

Obviously, we need some training for this. But it should be a training that would enable us precisely to convert everything into prayer. Even when we work, whether of the white-collar or blue-collar type of work, whether intellectual or manual, etc., we should be praying. That is to say, we should maintain our contact with God and channel what he has, his will and his ways, in all our daily affairs.

In that way we can reflect God’s love in all the situations, circumstances, predicaments, challenges in our life, etc. This love, of course, is concretely shown to us by Christ whose life and teaching we should truly learn and assimilate. Not only is Christ showing or teaching it to us. He is giving it to us by giving his own self, especially in the sacrament of the Holy Eucharist, if we also understand well the significance of the sacrament.
We need to discipline ourselves so as to make us always feel the need to echo the disciples’ request to Christ, “teach us to pray.” We have to be wary of our tendency to feel that with our human powers alone, we are already ok. We are not! Let’s not be deceived.