MANILA – The Philippines’ insurance sector is targeted to be at par with counterparts overseas with the latest rule requiring companies to meet a P1 billion minimum capital.

Finance Secretary Cesar Purisima said the insurance sector is among the industries expected to benefit from targeted integration of the Association of Southeast Asian Nation by 2015.

Purisima explained that premium of life and non-life insurance products in the country remain “quite high” but once the regional integration kicks in insurance companies in the country will face greater competition, thus, the need to keep up with the competition.

DA monitoring muscovado sugar
as part of ‘food defense’ system

The unconfirmed report of banana products to be exported to a foreign country intercepted when a nail was found in the shipment has heightened the campaign of the Department of Agriculture and the Bureau of Agriculture and Fisheries Product Standards on food defense and intentional contamination.

Karen Kristine Roscom, BAFPS chief science research specialist, who was in Bacolod City for the food defense awareness seminar, said the report came from a US private company that sells software on food defense.

Though it has not been confirmed, it was most probably caused by a disgruntled employee who wants to sabotage the shipment, she said.

Negrense ‘mask maker to the world’

Jojo Vito is now known, even in the Big Apple, as the mask maker.

At the 2012 Philippine Independence Day Parade in Manhattan, the MassKara Festival dancers, wearing Jojo’s masks, went home with the grand price trophy in the Marchers’ Category. In a field of competing dancers, Jojo’s creations had to be the group’s winning factor, a press release from the Negros Trade Fair organizers said.

In 2005, when Jojo’s printing business was on the edge of bankruptcy, he was invited to display his products at the Showroom of the Association of Negros Producers.

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