Excellent Sweet Potato Research By Mariano Marcos State University – Science Without A Human Phase!?

Above, a Facebook sharing by a common friend, Nestor Maniebo Pestelos: “Very Good Research Result Gone To Waste! – zac b. sarian.”
(Research image from[1] Victoria University of Wellington)

Zac Sarian sees failure on the part of the management of Mariano Marcos State University, MMSU, the institution that sponsored the sweet potato research – MMSU did not pursue the sweet results of a sweet potato study to its sweet conclusion:

Make the sweet potato results known to farmers so that they can profit from them – and the public can savor that success.

Based on personal knowledge, I say: “Zac, not only MMSU failed to bring the good news from research to farmers in this regard – among the SCUs, the biggest failure is UP Los Baños!”

A failure of leadership? No, it has been an institutional design failure.

On record, UP Los Baños has 3 major roles: Instruction, Research, Extension. The results of Good Research are supposed to be Extended to the people. As our Secretary of Agriculture William Dar put it when he was Director General of ICRISAT based in India:

“Science with a human face.”
What we have now is
Science with a human phase.
Juan Tamad phase!

And this is a continuing failure of the state colleges & universities, SCUs, with the leading example of neglect by UP Los Baños, which is now 112 years old.

I am now 80 years old; when I was about 40 working at the campus of UPCA, now UP Los Baños, the project “Social Lab” was on everyone’s lips. UPCA was doing Extension in one of the towns of Laguna. It turns out that the Social Lab was a World Bank project[2] (Worldbank.org).

UPCA’s Social Lab died a natural death.
UPLB has not resurrected it.
Or done any institutional extension program.

So, Zac, please do not single out MMSU – even the model University of the SCUs has failed the Filipino people!

Yes, MMSU and UPLB, sweet potato is not sweet potato if you withhold the better science of it.

Zac writes sadly:

WHILE GOING over articles that we have written in the past, one that dismayed us no end was about the research on lowland potatoes undertaken at the Mariano Marcos State University in Batac City, ilocos Norte. ¶ 10 VARIETIES IDENTIFIED – The research team headed by Beatriz Malab found that 10 potato varieties that had produced an average of 21 tons per hectare in farmers’ fields had been identified and ready for commercial planting.

But there have been no planting materials available! The MMSU research occurred in 1991. UP Los Baños was born in 1972, and nobody has been minding UPLB Extension either.

An agriculturist myself, I know UPLB and MMSU have failed to reproduce results of research into new and improved knowledge applicable by farmers because of the design of those institutions themselves – “Extension” is recorded but there is no separate office to primarily conduct extension.

With the state colleges & universities in the Philippines, historically Extension has failed because there is none!@

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[1]https://www.wgtn.ac.nz/library/research

[2]http://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/805031468758959378/text/multi0page.txt