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MANILA: On February 2013, Senior Writer of WIRED Magazine Steven Levy & others dared readers to "think big" (on pages 65-75) with 7 radical ideas, with this tagline on the cover: "One massive idea can change the world. Here are 7" – and these are:  (1) Make airplanes rechargeable. (2) Fuel the planet with micromachines. (3) Spray WiFi hot spots on everything. (4) Turn deserts into power plants. (5) Put digital displays in your eyes. (6) Declare war on incoming asteroids. (7) Build skycrapers out of diamonds. Great! But none is radical enough, and even all of them combined is limited in the size of the target. They are all private business-oriented, and not a single great idea declares war on poverty, and that is where the world's single greatest challenge lies. 500 million farm families times 4 in a household equals 2 billion lives, the world's single greatest number. But who gives a damn about any farm family? If the world's newspapers are to be bel

MANILA: ICRISAT is in business, in case you didn't know – for the farmers. The statement says it all: "ICRISAT creates business opportunities for farmer producer organizations" (ICRISAT Happenings 1647, 31 October 2014,  icrisat.org ): Farmer producer organizations (FPOs) from six states of India are benefiting from the agribusiness facilitation of ICRISAT that will enable them to operate as businesses and make their farm operations sustainable and profitable. I'm a very wide reader, but I never heard (or noticed) of "farmer producer organizations" until now. At any rate, ICRISAT, through its Agri-Business Incubation (ABI) unit, believed they were important enough to organize a 1-day summit for them, 27 October 2014, so I googled and found that, for instance, notably, 2014 has been declared by India's Department of Agriculture & Cooperation as "Year of Farmer Producer Organizations." So, the FPOs  are nationally important  to India. As an e