Ody Ilag, Rebirth Father of the UPLB Coop

MANILA: Who didn't know Leodegario Ilag? Ody was odd in an intellectual manner, and you were either in awe of him or in dread that he would accost you on the street and you didn't know what he was going to say, or ask. I wasn't a conformist myself, so not necessarily that I appreciated but I understood it. 
No, he didn't make a mark on the street; he made his mark in credit - this one I didn't know until today, researching on him. Now I can say that if you are a member of the UPLB Credit & Development Cooperative today, you should know enough to thank forever Ody for being what I will call The Rebirth Father of the UPLB Coop. Your coop, at that time was known as the UP College of Agriculture Credit & Cooperative Union and first headed by Nathaniel B Tablante (uplbcdc.net). Your coop began its life on 03 May 1961, and was simply referred to as Coop. I know, as I was Sophomore at UPCA at that time.

Ody's children say[1], with pride:
A major contribution Ody made in the field of cooperatives was to revive the (UPCA) Credit Union. When he was a board member in 1970, the Credit Union was on the verge of collapse due to lack of funds and limited business.

Your Coop wasn't dying - it was already dead, and the members of the board were writing the obituary already, but Ody thought the patient was just in shock and needed to be revived by a fresh infusion of blood: money!

Defying the odds and the recommendation from the other board members to dissolve the cooperative in 1972, he went to work and started a grassroots effort to first boost membership and increase its capital.

"Grassroots effort" - the Coop was meant for the employees of UPCA, so they were the grassroots. For the Coop, Ody was starting from the grassroots again. He wanted the odds in the Coop's favor. He had known how it is to be poor.

That will help explain why Ody was hardheaded when it came to your Coop. He didn't want it to die; he wanted it to live for the members. "Due to lack of funds and limited business" means, one, there were few members, that is, there was hardly any recruitment, and two, they were not borrowing enough from their own funds to grow their own business - the Coop itself was their business. None of them knew their business, not even the Board.

He pitched it to most if not all faculty members that joining the (UPCA) Credit Union was not about taking a personal loan but a public service to its less fortunate members.

Ody probably pitched it to all faculty members who were not yet members. That was how persistent he was.

The grassroots effort took hold and the Credit Union started to flourish, but Ody was never complacent. It is legendary how he would ask anyone whom he meets from all walks of life, within and outside the boundaries of (UPCA), whether they (were) members of the Credit Union.

Wasn't that another miracle of the 5 loaves of bread and 2 fish? For that little miracle, Ody never stopped accosting people on the road, and he loved to walk with his umbrella, opened or closed. He was Mary Poppins strolling.

Now the UPLB Credit Union continues to be a major financing vehicle for its more than 7,000 members, both UPLB employees and non-employees, with assets of over PhP 600 million. In 2009 alone, the annual revenue was more than PhP 48 million and provided loans of more than PhP300 million to its members. (This was written in 2010.)

So, ladies and gentlemen of the UPLB Coop, let's give credit to whom credit is due! It's not too late; credit is never too late.[2]

I remember Ody as a stern figure, walking on campus, his body ramrod straight, with his ubiquitous umbrella rain or shine, forgetting to smile, always pushing for some public agenda, even as I was. The times I remember, Ody was already a known character on campus, and so was I (to a lesser extent, I must say), but I did not accost anyone on the street; he did. He would debate with you, and so would I. He was his original man, and so was I. He was sympathetic to the rebels with a cause, and so was I. He was loud, and so was I, not a match made in heaven!

He attended grade school at the Lopez Elementary School, transferring to the Maquiling School, graduating as Class Valedictorian in 1952. He attended UP Rural High School, graduating as Class Valedictorian in 1956.

His children say, "Ody had early interests in Chemistry, but due to financial considerations, he attended the UP College of Agriculture, where he worked as a Student Assistant at the Department of Agricultural Economics." He graduated in 1960 with a BSA (Agricultural Economics), cum laude. His undergraduate thesis, "Farm Management and Cultural Practices, Cost and Returns of Coconut Farms in Camarines Sur, 1958-1959" won as the "Best Undergraduate Thesis in Agricultural Economics."

He completed his MS also at UPCA, submitting his thesis on "Farm Management Analysis of Some Sugarcane Farms in the Victoria's Mill District, Philippines" in 1964. On the 21st of December 1963, he married his former classmate, Lina Luna, who had just returned with her MS in Plant Pathology from the University of Hawaii.

Ody was granted a Rockefeller Foundation scholarship for his PhD at Purdue University in 1965. He earned another MS from Purdue in 1969, and then his PhD in 1970 with the dissertation, "An Economic Analysis of the Impact of the United States Sugar Policy on the Philippine Sugar Industry."

"He recalled," his children say, "the inspiration that what kept his desire to complete his PhD was seeing his youngest child at that time (Lawrence) crawling, and he wanted his son to be proud of him and not disappoint him."

I understand that. At UPCA then and UPLB now, a PhD attached to your name is a badge of honor.[3]

A true native, he was born in Los Baños on the 2nd of October 1938, the 5th of 6 siblings. His parents were poor; if he wanted BS Chemistry, he would have to board in Manila, and that was out of the question. So it had to be UPCA in Los Baños, because the tuition fee was much lower, and it was just next door. "Being poor," Ody's children say, "he prided himself in his early days as an entrepreneur selling 'Chicklet' chewing gum and cigarettes and emphasized to his children the value of hard work." Entrepreneurship with hard work sometimes works.

He returned with his PhD in 1970 and served as Chair of the Department of Agricultural Economics until 1971. He taught and advised students on farm management and cooperatives.

Instruction. One of Ody's legacies as instructor is Confusian teaching (my term), that is, teaching you by confusing you. "He would tell students that his role in teaching is to confuse them by way of being 'Confucius,'" Ody's children say. I know that for a fact. He was our lab instructor in 1st Year Economics (1959?) and that didn't endear him to us. Notwithstanding, his only daughter Liza swears that "his methods of instruction were ... quite effective" in his "diligent explanation (complete with graphical representation) of the Law of Supply and Demand and the Law of Diminishing Returns," after which Liza had a perfect score once in an Economics test. Liza, once is not enough!

And, of course, Ody's children are made of learner stuff, as shown in the fact that all graduated cum laudes (with honors), if differently:
Leodevico (Vic) with his BS Biology, magna cum laude, 1985.
Liza with her BS Biology, magna cum laude, 1986.
Lawrence (Larry) with his BS Biology, summa cum laude, 1987.
Leopold (Pol) with his BS Biology, magna cum laude, 1991.

A little note of oddity: Ody's children all took Biology, learning about life as lived; he took Economics, learning and preaching about life as earned.

Ody must have floated on air when Larry graduated with highest honors at his alma mater, now UP Los Baños. His children tell us that Larry graduated with a grade point average of 1.04, which remains unsurpassed (2010). If I knew Ody, he was driven, and so I think were his children.
On the side, he pursued Law by attending the San Pablo Colleges' College of Law on a part-time basis in the late 1980s, but that didn't amount to much. Among his treasures was his winning the Class C Los Baños Tennis Club Championship in 1977.

In summary, his children say:
In his career Ody focused his efforts more on translating theory into practice rather than on academic publications. Even before the term "microfinance" was coined and about the same time that Grameen financing was started by the (eventual) Nobel Laureate, Muhammad Yunus, Ody was also pioneering such efforts in the Philippines. Although this has not been documented in publications due to his lack of interest in publishing unfinished business, he had done several experiments on microfinance working with market vendors, housewives and simple entrepreneurs looking for credit to finance their business.

That's 2 things I didn't know of Ody; one, being not keen on publishing results of his thoughts and research; two, being a pioneer in microcredit at about the same time as Yunus. He really wanted to help the poor, if little by little. Sayang. Pity. Publications and microcredit would have been both his major contributions to the day and the morrow.

His children say:
He even conjured a theory that failure of cooperatives is due to management failure, mainly through financial mismanagement, which can be derived from the word "cooperatives" itself - coop - "pera" (Tagalog for money) - tives (poetic license for thieves). Ody is a "word gymnast" with fondness for acronyms and twisting meaning within words, which is classic Ody humor and more of a hobby.
Seriously, hundreds if not thousands of cooperatives in the Philippines have failed and continue to fail because of thieves in cooperatives.

Also seriously, he was playing with acronyms like ILAG, his family name, one of the several meanings that he assigned being "I Love Almighty God." I didn't know that Ody was religious. I'm not surprised, because I'm not that religious either.

Finally, his children say:
Towards the end of his academic career he ventured out of his comfort zone. He collaborated with two of his sons (Vic and Larry) and co-authored a peer-reviewed article "From patenting genes to proteins: The search for utility via function," which was published in the internationally recognized journal Trends in Biotechnology in 2002. This article explored the implications of the patenting of genes at that time and how it would impact innovation as well as the economies of Third World countries like the Philippines. This article would have significance especially with the recent decision by a US District court invalidating patents simply based on DNA sequence.

I don't understand patenting genes, but I understand that Ody was interested in the economics of it. Here's a quote from the abstract of that paper:
Here, we argue that unraveling the intrinsic complexity of proteins and their functions is the key towards determining the utility requirement for patenting protein inventions, and consider the possible socioeconomic impact.

I'll simply say here that the impact will be seen on the GDP, and leave it at that. Genes are not my cup of tea as they are to Ody's sons Vic and Larry.

Ody retired from UPLB in 2003 but remained active in the UPLB Coop serving as a Board Member. He suffered a stroke on the 2nd of August 2009 and underwent rehabilitation. Despite that physical challenge, he remained "actively involved in experimenting with novel financing initiatives for entrepreneurs who do not have ready access to capital, in partnership with his family." He was writing his memoirs, "Sharing."

He felt blessed with his wife Lina, 4 children and 3 grandchildren: Andee, Carlo and Melinda), as well as with his son-in-law Alvin Alviar and daughter-in-law Jocelyn Ng. Ody must have been proud that all his children attended UP Los Baños and graduated with high honors, surpassing his with honors only.

All that I see that as a sign that Ody Ilag was after all, a good teacher in theory, in practice, and in higher theory.

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[1] When I say "his children say," my source is the "Golden Profile" they wrote for their father: Leodevico, Liza, Lawrence and Leopold, 23 August 2010. The paragraphs I quote are in italics. You can view that profile here: Ilag, Leodegario M. The title of that piece is, simply, "Leodegario M Ilag." The very title and the tone of the writing in fact reflect in his children the detachment that Ody had to the world, except when he was interested in the subject or when he knew you.
[2] In case you didn't know, those sentences are a play of words 3 times: once, "To give credit to whom credit is due" is the popular motto; twice, credit (honor) belongs to Leodegario Ilag for resuscitating a dying Coop; thrice, "credit is never too late" refers to the fact that Ody deserves such honor even if he is no longer alive to receive it; he died 13 January 2012.
[3] I understand the glamor of it, but I don't value it as much as someone who has it.