MANILA - The Philippines hopes to increase its oil imports from Russia and its neighbors Malaysia and Indonesia to deal with rising prices in oil from the Mideast, a presidential spokesman said Saturday.

"We are looking at closer sources like our neighbors, Indonesia and Malaysia, and even from Russia. We have had initial importations from Russia and we hope to increase this," spokesman Ignacio Bunye said in a radio interview.

"We know that our principal source in the Middle East has been affected by violence," leading to the higher oil prices, he said.

Bunye did not specify how much oil the Philippines hoped to import from Russia or how much oil it had imported in the past.

Monitoring retailers

He said the government was trying to keep inflation down in the face of the rising oil prices by boosting food production, especially of rice and corn through the cultivation of high-yielding hybrid varieties.

The Trade Department was monitoring retailers to make sure they did not take advantage of the oil price hike by engaging in price gouging, Bunye said.

However Bunye shrugged off calls from leftist groups to repeal an oil deregulation law that removed price controls from fuel products, saying that the law was not responsible for the higher oil prices.

"We can see that the real reason local (oil) prices are going up is because of the continuing rise in world prices," he stressed.

Government officials previously said they would lower or abolish import duties for animal feed, chicken and pork products to keep inflation under control despite the upward pressure created by higher fuel costs. - AFP