In Agriculture, what’s happening to the Philippines I will now call creative partnership. Secretary of Agriculture William Dar/Manong Willie first learned the art & practice of that when he became the Director General of the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics, ICRISAT, based in India, in January 2000, when ICRISAT was #15 among the 15 international research centers of the CGIAR when he came in as DG. In the middle of his 15-year term, Manong Willie had transformed ICRISAT into #1. A major contributor to ICRISAT’s success? ICRISAT partnerships with public institutions, private individuals, philanthropists, people’s organizations, and the peasants themselves. It is the public-private partnership that creates the desired social climate changes. Is PH Agriculture bigger than that of ICRISAT? Not really. You work out the partnerships and you transform Obstacles into much-desired Opportunities, Options, Outputs and Outcomes good for the whole country!
And that is exactly how I understand him being the Wizard Of Os.
(Yes, the double meaning is intentional.)
He is an Ilocano, like me. Our tribe is known to be “hardworking, determined and persevering[1].” We dream. We prepare. We work our ass off.
My own successes at work have been puny compared to his, but nevertheless quite important to me as a creative thinker and writer since 16 April 1975, when I started my career as the Chief Information Officer of the Forest Research Institute, FORI. I stayed at FORI until mid-1981. In those years, we had to struggle with those big manual typewriters to write and edit our articles. In love with my work, I learned photography and fathered and was Editor in Chief of the 3 major publications of FORI: the monthly newsletter Canopy, quarterly technical journal Sylvatrop, and quarterly popular magazine Habitat.
In 1985, I became a Training Specialist of the Farming Systems & Soil Resources Institute, FSSRI, a component of UP Los Baños. At FSSRI on Innocents’ Day 1985, I began to learn personal computing with an IBM desktop PC using WordStar. Thus began my journey into the digital world.
Above, that photo I took 06 September 2019 with my Lumix FZ100 shows a coffee-table book titled “The Filipino Farmer Is Bankable” that I produced for the Agricultural Credit Policy Council, ACPC. As Executive Director of ACPC, Jovita Corpuz recruited me after asking around. “You have only 2 months – can you do it?” I did, delivering printed copies on the day of celebration, April 2012. I produced that book, 150 pages. Half of the photographs were mine, the cover photo showing a white onion field, displaying positive growth. And Microsoft Office helped me all along, Office 2010 if I remember right – I never left Microsoft Office after I began using Microsoft Word 1 in 1987. Microsoft Office, my digital ally.
Alliances. With this essay, for the new PH Agriculture, I say the old Me First Journalism must go. Yes:
The new PH Journalism must be a creative partnership, all our journalists working to show Solidarity, not Superiority. We must be allies for our country!@517
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