Time to be prudent

If there is one message the onslaught of Super Typhoon Yolanda has so savagely delivered to numerous businesses in the country, it’s that the debilitating impact of natural calamities has been increasingly harder to predict, much less prepare for. Climate change has rewritten the rules of Mother Nature. What used to be regarded as “un-floodable” and immune to typhoons had already been heavily flooded and rained out to submission. No place is immune, no place is safe.

Perhaps now is the appropriate time to revisit a rule that adversely affects rural banks’ profitability by tying their balance sheet to the fate of agriculture, one sector that is heavily dependent on the whims of the weather.