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MANILA: It seemed strange that Director General William Dar of ICRISAT was asked to address on 26 October 2014 a convocation of the 2014 graduating class of the Synergy School of Business (SSB) at Hyderabad in India. ICRISAT's mandate is research in agriculture, specifically in the growing of 5 crops for the drylands of Africa and Asia: chickpea, peanut, pearl millet, pigeon pea, and sorghum. Actually, ICRISAT is also into business partnerships, having the Agri-Business Incubation (ABI) set up at its campus in Patancheru, Telangana, India. In fact, ICRISAT's ABI won the prestigious Asian Association of Business Incubation (AABI) Award in 2008. In January 2014, ICRISAT held a 1-day Agribusiness Fair at its headquarters and was attended by more than 300 agribusiness innovators and entrepreneurs (ANS, 17 January 2014,  icrisat.org ). On that occasion, Dar said: ICRISAT nurtures a research for development paradigm, now guided by a strategic framework called Inclusive Market-Oriente

MANILA: ICRISAT tweets: "How can sustainable intensification make farming climate-smart?" on 17 October 2014 at 1:53 AM. Early bird. Will this early bird get the worm? The worm is  sustainable intensification of agriculture,  Sinag, my acronym. It just happens that the word formed is Filipino. In Tagalog,  sinag  means  halo around the heads of images of saints, lamp, moon, ray of light from sun, stars;  it also means  glimmer  ( tagalogtranslate.com ). It signifies knowledge or wisdom. In Ilocano,  sinag  is a prefix that indicates how many strands are twisted together to make a rope; thus,  sinagdudua  means  made of 2 strands  (Carl R Galvez Rubino,  books.google.co.in ). It signifies strength. Very useful metaphors, as we shall see later, after we get to know what sustainable intensification of agriculture actually is. Has ICRISAT gotten Sinag right? If it hasn't, it is a sin against agriculture! So what do we know about the subject? In their paper published in 1999,