SEARCA Working With PH SCUs For Sustainable Aggie Prosperity In The Villages


Opportunities: On Facebook, Director Glenn B Gregorio shares the Manila Standard news written by Brenda Jocson: “SEARCA, PhilRice Renew Ties For PH Rice Industry[1].” Very interesting – not the ordinary title but the extraordinary content. Sir, did you know actually you are revolutionizing the role of SCUs?!

Options: My photograph above dramatizes rice demos being conducted to provide discussion points for the 8th National Rice Technology Forum, NRTF in my hometown Asingan, Pangasinan on Sunday, 24 March 2019. (Superimposed, the image of Secretary of Education Leonor Briones, who supports SEARCA’s Director, to her left.) The NRTF is extension work by the Department of Agriculture, DA, and breeding companies on hybrid rice. Inbred and hybrid are options.

Outputs: As I was going to say before I interrupted myself, under a 3-year Memorandum of Agreement, MoA, signed between them on 20 January 2020, SEARCA and PhilRice, according to Ms Brenda, “commit to collaborate on several activities including joint research, capacity building activities, and knowledge and information exchange[2].” The MoA was signed by Mr Gregorio and PhilRice Director John C De Leon at PhilRice headquarters in Nueva Ecija, after the former spoke on his plans for SEARCA.

Wow! In my 44 years of science writing, in agriculture and related fields, this is my first to see a combination of RTE – research, training (capacity building), and extension (knowledge & information exchanges) – agreed upon in a single MoA. I love it!

You know what? I know SEARCA, which is the acronym for Southeast Asian Regional Center for Graduate Study & Research in Agriculture, works with Schools, Colleges & Universities, SCUs, in Southeast Asia: Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar. Singapore, Thailand, the Philippines, and Vietnam. Now then, I see this MoA as an excellent precedent for SCUs anywhere and everywhere to work with SEARCA in conducting RTE, so that the SCUs in the Philippines (and elsewhere) can contribute to the national goal of sustainable prosperity in the villages.

I am particularly interested in extension, where knowledge exchanges are between scientists & scientists and between scientists & technicians, and information exchange is between knowledge popularizers and farmers.

I believe that was the ultimate objective of the Open Academy for Philippine Agriculture, OpAPA, proposed for adoption by Philippine agricultural bodies by then Director General William Dar of the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics, ICRISAT, based in India. I knew of this because I was somehow involved in getting OpAPA off the ground and, in fact, wrote a guidebook on how to bring OpAPA to life to be meaningful to the farmers; I called the book of 198 pages Geography Of Knowledge. It was not adopted, not even adapted. I still have a soft copy of it – the title of which should give a good idea what it is all about, and how to go about knowledge sharings (plural).

Outcomes? Without a roadmap, OpAPA could not reach its destination. We get lost travelling the geography of knowledge if we do not know what we do not know!@517







[1]https://www.manilastandard.net/index.php/mobile/article/315835?fbclid=IwAR2R8IzQ2JorkKtOJ_-tUd3Gf5b79mygTpxY45eSAp1dWDR_pWwykwyFbCk
[2]https://www.manilastandard.net/index.php/mobile/article/315835?fbclid=IwAR2R8IzQ2JorkKtOJ_-tUd3Gf5b79mygTpxY45eSAp1dWDR_pWwykwyFbCk

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