Executive Order No. 350

Also known as: EO 350 — the docket styling · The PRISCO creation order — the creation-instrument styling · The PRATRA and NARIC dissolution order — the styling of Sections 11 and 12 · The October 3, 1950 reorganization order — the date styling, from the order's own "Done" line

Government

Definition

Executive Order No. 350 is the instrument of President Elpidio Quirino, “Done in the City of Manila, this 3rd day of October” 1950, carrying the title “CREATING THE PRICE STABILIZATION CORPORATION AND DISSOLVING THE PHILIPPINE RELIEF AND TRADE REHABILITATION ADMINISTRATION AND THE NATIONAL RICE AND CORN CORPORATION.” (LawPhil — EO 350) The order recites its authority in its opening line — “Pursuant to the powers vested in me by Republic Act Numbered Four hundred and twenty-two, I, ELPIDIO QUIRINO, President of the Philippines, do hereby order” — RA 422 being the 1950 statute authorizing the President “TO REORGANIZE WITHIN ONE YEAR THE DIFFERENT EXECUTIVE DEPARTMENTS, BUREAUS, OFFICES, AGENCIES AND OTHER INSTRUMENTALITIES OF THE GOVERNMENT, INCLUDING THE CORPORATIONS OWNED OR CONTROLLED BY IT,” and Section 1 then creates the body outright: “There is hereby created a public corporation under the name of the ‘PRICE STABILIZATION CORPORATION’ which, in short, shall be known as the ‘PRISCO'” — chartered for twenty-five years, with head office in Manila and branches, agencies or representatives “within and outside of the Philippines.” (LawPhil — EO 350, LawPhil — RA 422)

The order did two things at once, and its second act is why it survives in the record. Section 11 dissolved the two postwar trading bodies — “The Philippine Relief and Trade Rehabilitation Administration and the National Rice and Corn Corporation are hereby dissolved,” with any statutory reference to either, “including its designation under Act No. 4198,” thereafter read as a reference to PRISCO — and Section 12 moved the estates whole: “The personnel, records, properties, equipment, assets, rights, choses in action, obligations, liabilities, and contracts” of PRATRA and NARIC were “transferred to, vested in, and assumed by the PRISCO.” (LawPhil — EO 350) The order carries no preamble of its own — it opens straight from the RA 422 recital into Section 1 — and states its object instead in Section 2(a): the “prevention, locally or generally, of scarcity, monopolization, hoarding, injurious speculation, manipulation, private control, and profiteering, affecting the supply, distribution, and movement of all articles, goods, or commodities of prime necessity” — the scarcity-and-speculation setting of the import-control year 1950. (LawPhil — EO 350)

Identities

Source Type	Identity
Wikipedia	N/A — no standalone article (opensearch verified empty this session)
Wikidata	N/A — entity search returns no item for the order (verified this session)
DBpedia	N/A — no resource at the data endpoint (verified empty this session)
ProductOntology	N/A
Wiktionary	executive order (noun — “(law, especially US, Philippines) An ordinance issued by the authority of the head of the executive branch of government”; the instrument class of EO 350, not the order itself) (Wiktionary — executive order)
Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH)	N/A — LC authorities search returns no matching heading (verified this session)
MeSH	N/A
NCBI Taxonomy	N/A
AGROVOC	price stabilization (c_28746) — the policy the order’s title names, not the order itself (label verified via the AGROVOC search service this session) (AGROVOC — price stabilization)
Google Scholar	Executive Order 350 October 3 1950 Quirino Price Stabilization Corporation PRISCO RA 422 reorganization PRATRA NARIC dissolution merger state trading Philippines import control 1950
ConceptNet	N/A (ConceptNet API unreachable this session — HTTP 502)
OpenCyc	N/A

Also Known As

EO 350 — the docket styling
The PRISCO creation order — the creation-instrument styling
The PRATRA and NARIC dissolution order — the styling of Sections 11 and 12
The October 3, 1950 reorganization order — the date styling, from the order’s own “Done” line

Examples and Analogies

Two instruments in one: EO 350 is simultaneously a corporate charter (Sections 1–10, on capital, board, and powers) and a dissolution-and-transfer order (Sections 11–12) — a birth certificate written to double as two death certificates. (LawPhil — EO 350)
A reorganization window used at speed: RA 422 gave the President one year to rebuild the executive establishment including government corporations; EO 350, issued inside that window, consolidated the rehabilitation and grains portfolios into a single ₱30-million trading corporation by order rather than by statute. (LawPhil — RA 422, LawPhil — EO 350)
An order unwound in slices: Congress carved NARIC back out by RA 663 in 1951 — “The present National Rice and Corn Corporation as merged with the PRISCO by Executive Order No. 350 is dissolved” — and dissolved what remained into NAMARCO by RA 1345 in 1955 — “The Price Stabilization Corporation (PRISCO) is hereby dissolved in the manner hereinafter provided.” (LawPhil — RA 663, LawPhil — RA 1345)
Verified statutory data:
Issuance: October 3, 1950, Malacañan, Manila; signed ELPIDIO QUIRINO, “By the President: TEODORO EVANGELISTA, Executive Secretary”; authority recited — “Pursuant to the powers vested in me by Republic Act Numbered Four hundred and twenty-two” (LawPhil — EO 350)
Creation (Sec. 1): public corporation, “PRICE STABILIZATION CORPORATION,” short name “PRISCO”; twenty-five-year term; Manila head office (LawPhil — EO 350)
Capital and board (Secs. 3–5): ₱30,000,000 “to be subscribed entirely by the Republic of the Philippines”; a chairman and six members appointed by the President with the consent of the Commission on Appointments (LawPhil — EO 350)
Dissolutions (Sec. 11): PRATRA and NARIC dissolved; references redirected to PRISCO, including NARIC’s designation under Act No. 4198 (LawPhil — EO 350)
Transfers (Sec. 12): personnel, records, properties, equipment, assets, rights, choses in action, obligations, liabilities, and contracts transferred to, vested in, and assumed by PRISCO (LawPhil — EO 350)
Effectivity (Sec. 15): “The Executive Order shall take effect on October third, nineteen hundred and fifty.” (LawPhil — EO 350)

Usage Scenarios

1. Citing PRISCO’s Foundation

Every legal question of what PRISCO was — corporate form, capital, term, board — begins and ends with this order, cited by section; the fuller corporate record is carried in this wiki’s Price Stabilization Corporation entry. (LawPhil — EO 350)

2. Reconstructing the 1950 Merger

What became of PRATRA’s rehabilitation estate and NARIC’s mills, warehouses, and contracts on October 3, 1950 resolves to Sections 11 and 12, quoted by section rather than paraphrased. (LawPhil — EO 350)

3. Studying the RA 422 Reorganization Power

The order is a clean specimen of the 1950 reorganization authority: an explicit statutory recital, a consolidation of two corporations into a third, and the one-year window RA 422 set — the same authority this wiki’s corpus entries trace through the era’s other orders. (LawPhil — RA 422, LawPhil — EO 350)

4. Tracing the Unwinding, 1950–1955

The order’s reversal runs through three instruments: EO 384 of December 21, 1950 transferred import-licensing powers to PRISCO; RA 663 of June 16, 1951 pulled NARIC back out by statute; RA 1345 of June 17, 1955 dissolved PRISCO into NAMARCO. (LawPhil — EO 384, LawPhil — RA 663, LawPhil — RA 1345)

Strategies

Merge the portfolio by order: under RA 422, one instrument created the successor, dissolved the predecessors, and vested their estates in the new corporation — wholesale reorganization in nine months rather than legislation in two Congresses. (LawPhil — RA 422, LawPhil — EO 350)
Capitalize from the treasury, control by the board: capital “subscribed entirely by the Republic” with a Commission-on-Appointments board made public control structural rather than regulatory. (LawPhil — EO 350)
Legislate the purpose, order the means: RA 422’s declaration of policy — “to promote simplicity, economy and efficiency” in the government’s instrumentalities “including all corporations owned or controlled by the Government,” by “consolidating services, activities and functions of a similar nature” — is the program EO 350 executed on the trading side, merging two commodity traders into one. (LawPhil — RA 422, LawPhil — EO 350)
Dissolve forward, never liquidate: Section 12 vested the dissolved bodies’ obligations and contracts in the successor, so the state’s trading continuity survived the change of corporate personality. (LawPhil — EO 350)

Security and Safety Measures

Food-supply security as charter purpose: Section 2 armed the corporation to prevent “scarcity, monopolization, hoarding, injurious speculation” in prime commodities and to “commandeer, requisition and ration said articles” — emergency supply powers written into the trading corporation itself. (LawPhil — EO 350)
Audit and inventory discipline: the Auditor General appointed PRISCO’s auditor and fixed accounting methods, annual audited statements were required, and the transferred estates passed subject to inventory. (LawPhil — EO 350)
Civil-service safeguards: appointments on “merit and efficiency” without political tests, with reappointment windows for transferred personnel. (LawPhil — EO 350)
For researchers: the founding date is October 3, 1950, per the order’s own “Done” line and its Section 15 effectivity clause — not July or mid-1950 as some summaries render it; and PRISCO did not exist before that date, so transactions of 1949 or early 1950 belong to PRATRA or NARIC, not to PRISCO. (LawPhil — EO 350)

Historical Context

The order belongs to the scarcity years of the restored Republic, when postwar rehabilitation trading (PRATRA) and the state grains trade (NARIC, tracing to Act No. 4198) sat beside an import-control apparatus under price pressure. Congress had opened the reorganization door in 1950 through RA 422, declaring “simplicity, economy and efficiency” the policy of the government’s instrumentalities — “including all corporations owned or controlled by the Government” — and authorizing the President to execute it within one year. (LawPhil — RA 422) Quirino used that authority on October 3, 1950 to fold both trading bodies into a single ₱30-million stabilization corporation against the scarcities and speculation Section 2(a) catalogued. (LawPhil — EO 350)

The consolidation lasted eight months as designed. EO 384 of December 21, 1950 added import-licensing powers to the trading corporation; then Congress acted — RA 663 of June 16, 1951 re-created NARIC by statute and dissolved the merged body, and RA 1345 of June 17, 1955 dissolved PRISCO itself into the National Marketing Corporation, moving the estate and the provincial sales network to NAMARCO — the order-versus-statute contest this wiki’s entries on the Price Stabilization Corporation and Republic Act No. 663 document. (LawPhil — EO 384, LawPhil — RA 663, LawPhil — RA 1345)

Challenges and Controversies

Order Versus Statute

The President merged two government corporations into a third by executive order under RA 422; Congress unmerged one of them by statute within eight months and dissolved the whole within five years — the elected branches contesting, through the instruments themselves, whether rehabilitation trading, grains trading, and import licensing belonged in one corporation at all. (LawPhil — EO 350, LawPhil — RA 663, LawPhil — RA 1345)

Trading Power Joined to Licensing Power

EO 384’s addition of import-licensing authority to a corporation that itself imported made PRISCO both regulator and competitor — a concentration the era’s litigation policed, as this wiki’s Price Stabilization Corporation entry records. (LawPhil — EO 384)

The Date Discipline

Secondary accounts variously date PRISCO’s creation to mid-1950 or leave it undated; the order’s own register — the “Done” line of October 3, 1950 and Section 15’s effectivity on “October third, nineteen hundred and fifty” — governs. (LawPhil — EO 350)

An Instrument Without a Register

The order has no standalone Wikipedia article, no Wikidata item, and no DBpedia resource — verified empty at all three this session — so its public memory lives in the statutory record: EO 350 itself, EO 384, RA 663, and RA 1345. (LawPhil — EO 350)