Thanks for the suggestion. I played with envvar plugin and figured out that it really matters. For some reason however I get the PATH variable modified somehow else.
So, basically, I set PATH in envvar as
/opt/zombo:/opt/gcc-4.4.3/bin:$PATH
then in Makefile after echo $(PATH) I get
/opt/gcc-4.2.1/bin:/opt/zombo:/opt/gcc-4.4.3/bin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/local/games:/usr/games
Thus I assume someone really wants to use gcc 4.2.1.
Could anyone explain this?