Sugar shipped to 7 countries

It certainly is welcome news. The latest from SRA administrator Ma. Regina Bautista Martin that the country has shipped sizeable amounts of sugar to several other countries other than just the United States, but also to Indonesia, Japan, Taiwan, Taiwan, and Vietnam.

That means the sugar trade offensive launched by Martin has proven effective in biting into areas that had never used to buy local sugar.

That may explain the sights last week of thousands of heavily loaded cane trucks merrily wind their way through the Southern Negros highway to Biscom, La Carlota, and the other mill in Kabankalan City.

As far as the eye could see, there were hundreds of loaded cane trucks parked along the highway and in the parking areas of Binalbagan-Isabela Sugar Company.

The waiting cane trucks were parked along the highway as far as Himamaylan City. And more kept coming. Of course, drivers must have been frustrated with the long wait for their time to be given the go-signal to pour their heavy loads into Biscom.

Since other trucks were also roaring northwards, possibly for La Carlota City, one could just imagine the congestions before the Pedro Rojas mill in that city.

Another welcome sight, large swaths of cane fields were being harvested. Sights I saw while going to and from Kabankalan City where I spent four nights and three days at the Zaycoland Resort in a convivance of some 225 catechists of the Neo-Catechumenal Way from the two Negros Province under Fr. Angel Mojica, Columbian-Italian priest.

I hope that the sugar production this crop year will also be gobbled up by foreign buyers, although I still have to hear about the outcome of the negotiation for some 30,000 tons of sugar by Tunisia. This was confirmed by Mrs. Martin.

A local columnist was involved in the negotiation initiated by his son-in-law on behalf of Tunisia. The problem got stuck by the search of bottoms. It seems not many ships are available to travel all the way from the Philippines to North Africa.

Well, I’m just crossing my fingers that God bless these negotiations and make them bear fruit. That could open for the Philippines another area where hitherto local sugar had never been exported.

* * *

But there were other glimpses into developments outside the traditional sources of news. Like what I had noted in the video of Italian TV news of how more than 5,000 young boys from various countries of the world stampeded their way up the Pope during the last World Youth Day to offer themselves for the priesthood. It was sight to see these young people, some openly crying, as they asked for the blessings of the cardinals and bishops on stage.

But it was not just that. There were more than 3,000 young girls, including from Scandinavian countries, who also rushed to the stage for the call for those who would offer their lives to become cloistered nuns.

The La Cibeles Plaza spectacle must have confounded the secular leaders of Spain who even now ban teachers from speaking about God in their classrooms.

And that it’s in Spain, the source of our Catholic Faith.

But the most spectacular was that Kiko Arugello, founder of the Neo-Catechumen communities, had called for young men to volunteer for the 20,000 missionary priest needed for China.

Many of these included sons of the poor and the affluent families of Catholic or the way as they call it.

Kiko reported that already 450 of the young from the previous calling are already in the 58 seminaries around the globe, readying themselves for the China, India and other missions, including Europe.

And he also reported how monasteries for cloistered nuns of religious orders whose houses are virtually empty of new postulants have begged for the volunteers to fill up their emptying buildings.

So the present spectacle shows former year empty monasteries now filled to the rifts with mostly comely young girls, many of them college graduates, volunteer to work behind veiled cloisters.

To date, some religious orders, hit by the sudden influx of volunteer nuns, have even split when designed for Neo-Catechmenate nuns and the other for the traditional order.

Birth pangs of the new evangelization, but a signal that God has been working silently to revive the spread to the Christian gospel including in Europe despite the apostasy of several Christian socialites.

So, why worry about what’s happening to the world? God is still working miracles that are confounding us.*

back to top