It’s Hard To Appreciate The Scenes If We Don’t Have Any Vision!

3 times I’ve been reading Inquirer’s Cielito F Habito’s 10 March 2025 column titled “Bridging A Divided Nation” (“No Free Lunch,” opinion.inquirer.net), and I see the major reason for divisiveness: Lack of Vision. (That’s what the image also implies.)

So we cannot all say, “Wen a!” (“Yes, well said!”) So we say, instead “Wenno?” (“What else can we do? What are our choices?”) And we stop there, literally. If not enough of us agree, we cannot solve our common problems!

I’m an Agriculturist (UPLB ’65), Ag Edu, WA 2.35; Civil Service Professional 1964, 80.6% – and a very wide reader, from Agriculture to Writing, turning even more active when the Internet came to the Philippines in 1991, or 34 years ago. I’m in the first place a son of a farmer, Dionisio Hilario, so I was born with dirt on my hands, you can say.

As a wide reader, I don’t agree with much of what is going on in my country today, not much of what our leaders are saying. “It’s easier to bring heaven and earth together than have two Filipinos agree on anything,” Mr Ciel quotes Spanish-time Filipino rebel General Antonio Luna as saying. I agree!

To bring Filipinos to agree on the big issues about PH agriculture, I am hereby advising, through our columnist Mr Habito, if he may, counseling our President Ferdinand Marcos Jr to re-appoint William Dollente Dar as Secretary of Agriculture because Mr Dar has the vital Vision that heads of the DA have commonly lacked since way back when!

Proof without proof? Be informed that it was Mr Dar as Director General (DG) of the nternational Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) based in India who brought headed ICRISAT when it was struggling on its feet and was the kulelat (last placer) in the group of 15 research centers that were members of the CGIAR (Ccnsultative Group for International Agricultural Research). Within a few years from being DG, with the Vision that Mr Dar came up with for ICRISAT, “Science with a human face,” ICRISAT rose to be #1 in the CGIAR group of international agencies. Unprecedented! Achievement by a Filipino visionary!

How do I know all that? I was a Writer From Home (WFH) international worker for ICRISAT for years, from 2007 to 2014.

With agriculture in so much trouble as it is all over the world, as Vision, Mr Dar’s “Science with a farmer’s face” is as bright a scene as the morning sun!

Sorry but UP Los Baños is a hundred years away from thinking about it – if at all, UPLB keeps thinking about “Science with a scientist’s face” and not “Science with a farmer’s face.” Just read the papers they present at conventions and the papers they present for publication in scientific journals!

Why not “Science with a shining farmer’s face!”?

Aggie scientists should think about the expensive Chemical Agriculture package that they have been “selling” to farmers all these hundred years since UPLB was born in 1908.

UPLB, wake up!@517