Food and fuel hike are threats to country’s development says Angara

SENATE OFFICE, Manila, April 16, 2011-Senator Edgardo J. Angara, Chair of the Congressional Commission on Science Technology and Engineering (COMSTE), urged the government to invest more in using science and technology (S&T) to help the country in dealing with the problems caused by continues uprising costs of fuel and food as well as disaster preparedness, saying that these are threats to the development of the Philippines which merits only little attention by the government.

Angara issued the statement in the light of the announcement from the Asian Development Bank (ADB) stating that the discussions of its upcoming annual meeting center on the rising costs of food and fuel.

He said that the ADB reported that high food and fuel prices are complicating economic and monetary policymaking and are being compounded by the region’s challenges. These other challenges include natural calamities like floods and earthquakes. 

The ADB also said that the ADB’s upcoming annual meeting of its board of governors in Hanoi, Vietnam, will assess these immediate and long-term hurdles with ministers and senior government officials, business leaders, fellow international financial institutions, and civil society representatives.

“These issues can be tackled by using S&T solutions, which COMSTE has been promoting,” Angara said, saying that the COMSTE has identified the development of electric vehicles and green transport as priority projects of the commission for 2011.

“Innovative Green transport systems like electric tricycles, hybrid jeepneys, buses and electric bicycles have the potential to lessen pollution caused by conventional transportation and the dependency on fossil fuels,” Angara said.

He added that one major target should be achieving food security where the COMSTE is working on plans to help develop improved farm to market logistics as well as creating more resilient agricultural systems that can withstand climate change.

Angara furthered that another COMSTE project is the Disaster Science Management Center (DSMC) which is ready to assist in preparing the nation for dealing with disasters like the devastating earthquake that recently hit Japan, now that it is in possession of the Metro Manila Earthquake Impact Reduction Study (MMEIRS), a report on the safety of the Bataan Nuclear Power Plant and a Disaster and Complexity study.

The MMEIRS is a joint study that was undertaken by the Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology (PHIVOLCS), the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) and the Metro Manila Development Authority (MMDA) to create an earthquake scenario damage map of Metro Manila while the DSMC help us to prepare for earthquakes, typhoons and similar disasters that will continue to threaten the country.

“The government needs to be able to understand how to develop an advanced and real-time information dissemination strategy, so people can better prepare to handle such events,” Angara said. (Jason de Asis)