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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 w...

MANILA: On Monday, 15 September 2014, ICRISAT Director General William Dar was informed by the Indian National Organizing Committee of the Agriculture Leadership Awards that on Saturday, 27 September 2014, he will be conferred the  Lifetime Achievement Award  in an apt ceremony at the Taj Palace Hotel in New Delhi in India. The letter was signed by MJ Khan, President of the  Agriculture Today  Group, the sponsor of the Awards that this year include these categories: Policy, Research, Extension, Farming, Industry, Environment, Innovation, Entrepreneurship, CSR, Development, Lifetime Achievement, and State Leadership. It is high honor. The magazine  Agriculture Today  is the leading exponent of agricultural progress in the huge, progressive country called India, where ICRISAT is based.  If your base country loves you, you must be good. Khan said in the letter, "Agriculture Leadership Awards were started in 2008 to recognize the leadership roles pl...

MANILA: I'm worried about the AFTA coming to town in 2015, even if UP Diliman Professor of Asian Studies Eduardo Climaco Tadem is not, even as he quotes a    conclusion of a 2013 joint study by the Asian Development Bank and Southeast Asian Studies that    the Asean Free Trade Area is not going to happen in 2015, that Asean "has no prospect of coming close to (becoming a) single market by the AEC's 2015 deadline – or even by 2020 or 2025" (04 May 2014,  inquirer.net ). What they mean is that the AFTA is not going to be fully implemented in 2015. That's like saying there are not going to be market earthquakes in the Asean next year, so why worry? Ah yes, the optimist see the doughnut, the pessimist sees the hole! Professor Tadem does not see the donut that I see, even as I also see that we have to cook it before we can eat it. Because he cannot see the whole, the Professor is not considering the parts that make the whole. So, he echoes former NEDA Director Genera...

MANILA:  As I begin to write this, Friday, 28 March 2014, we are in the village of Lasip in Malasiqui, Pangasinan in Central Luzon, Philippines; we are on our 3rd day and 3rd ARBO business plan finalization visits, after Rissing Multi-Purpose Cooperative in Bangar, La Union on Wednesday afternoon, and after San Jose MPC in Caba, La Union on Thursday. We are working as consultants under the ARCCESS Project of the Department of Agrarian Reform. ARCCESS is the Agrarian Reform Community Connectivity and Economic Support Services project for the farmers whom the DAR prefers to call the  agrarian reform beneficiaries (ARBs);  DAR wants the ARBs to be economically better off, to learn market-oriented farming, along the way to decide for themselves. Farmers or ARBs, following the DAR's initiative, we should want all farmers to be market-oriented. Unless you want them to be poor forever. Farmers market-oriented? Look, so far in our 6 months of teaching (and learning) from the ARBs...

ARAMAL, SAN FABIAN:  Here is Saturnino Distor, General Manager of the Aramal-Tocok Multi-Purpose Cooperative of San Fabian, Pangasinan yesterday, Saturday, 15 March 2014, speaking at the conclusion of the 11-module training program we have been conducting since August 2013 for Agrarian Reform Beneficiaries Organizations (ARBOs) in La Union and Pangasinan. GM Distor is talking about our consultancy services for common service facilities (CSF) for production & processing, agri-technology and agri-extension services within the Agrarian Reform Community Connectivity and Economic Support Services (ARCCESS) Project of the Department of Agrarian Reform (DAR). For all that language, UMIC's part of Project ARCCESS is  market-oriented, meaning the farmers must produce and process for the market and profit from all that. Specifically, GM Distor is talking about the 3-day  Workshop on Cooperative Business Planning  held at the ATI Training Center in Santa Barbara on 26-2...

MANILA: In planning for Africa or Asia, you map out what you want to do. The questions are: What are you mapping out for? How do you get there? Most of all, where are you coming from? We can have the answers for ourselves if we learn from the bad and good lessons of ICRISAT in the last 40 years. ICRISAT wasn't always that smart. ICRISAT was in Africa for this year's regional planning meetings for West and Central Africa (WCA) on 22-24 January in Barmako in Mali and on 27-29 January in Nairobi in Kenya. In Barmako, scientists came from the regional and country offices in WCA and from ICRISAT headquarters in India to map out the WCA's research agenda. In Nairobi, the planning meeting was attended by scientists and staff who came from ICRISAT Kenya, Malawi, Ethiopia and Zimbabwe as well as from the WCA and ICRISAT India (31 January 2014,  ICRISAT Happenings 1608,  icrisat.org ). Actually, all those ICRISAT scientists and staff came from the same place:  Isla de Caridad ...