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MANILA:  Inanglupa  translates literally as  Motherland , the preferred translation, but which I prefer to translate as  Mother Earth , because the name refers first of all to the soil. Inanglupa, the Philippine movement founded last year by former Director General of ICRISAT William Dar, has been inspired by Bhoochetana, the highly successful joint project of the State of Karnataka in India and ICRISAT under William Dar, and about which I have written 22 long essays, the first one being "The Bhoochetana Revolution. Political will applied with science" (04 July 2012,  A Magazine Called Love,  blogspot.com ). In rejuvenating their soils by Bhoochetana, Indian farmers earned  additional  incomes of a minimum Rs4,470/ha for sunflower to a maximum Rs23,090/ha for peanut that year. They were just starting. Bhoochetana  means  revival of the soil;  this was one of the things that ICRISAT taught the farmers of Karnataka to do: Find out what plant nutrients are lacking in your soils,

MANILA:  Saturday, 08 August 2015: I created the blog  The Coop Crusader  today ( blogspot.com ); I have since collected my earlier essays on the subject & related ones, 1 or 2 of them dating back to the year 2007, and will continue to write on it, because now I as writer and worker am firmly convinced that the multipurpose cooperative is the undiscovered modern-day  Redeemer  or  Savior  of the poor. Here are definitions of those concepts from the  American Heritage Dictionary : Redeem:  restore the honor, worth or reputation of . Save:  set free from consequences of sin; rescue from harm, danger or loss. So, which one should I choose as the correct role of a coop with respect to the members and their poverty? I choose both.  Redeemer  because the coop could restore the worth of a poor member as a dignified human being.  Savior  because the coop could set the members free from their debts and exploitative relationships with others. And those are exactly what I want to point out in

MANILA:  When friends ask me if I'm in favor of this or that GMO, I always tell them, "I don't discourage GMO. I don't encourage it either." Yes, it's a safe answer, because if GMO turns out to be good, I'm innocent of saying anything against it. No, it's not a safe answer, because if GMO turns out to be bad, I'm guilty of not having said anything against it. Edmund Burke, British author and political thinker, said, "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing." I want to be good. A GMO is a genetically modified organism, as in the Bt eggplant, where something has been extracted from the soil bacteria  Bacillus thuringiensis  (Bt) that is then introduced into the genetic makeup of the seed (the crop) to fight stem borers and avoid having its grower (the farmer) spray an insecticide, say Carbaryl. The logic? An ounce of Bt is worth a pound of Carbaryl. In my view, both sides, those in favor of GMO and tho