SRO At 86 – A New Challenge? Golden Rice

Happy 86th Birthday SRO! May you have more happy rices to come! As my tribute, I have created a component of my theory of Communication for Development (C4D) in your honor: Advice from Age for Development (AA4D).

I understand that once in a while, Santiago Rigonan Obien, who loves his initials SRO, takes over the chairmanship of Asia Rice Foundation (Asia Rice), which is based at Searca, which is based at the campus of the University of the Philippines Los Baños. Asia Rice is Asia-wide; Searca is Asean-wide; and UPLB is nationwide – in one geographical location in my country, all the bases of Asian science are covered!

I mentioned on page 2 of my 1st internationally published book Team ICRISAT Champions The Poor (2007, 133 pages), published by the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT), that I had written on SRO this article: “Management: Relating Is Everything. Or, The Wizard Of Rice Who Cultivated Minds,’ 31 July 2006, https://americanfrank@blogspot.com).

The image above is from that article – 15 years later, he is still “in love” with hybrid rice. And I don’t blame him. In humans, the preferred and welcome multiplication mode is hybrid – you marry preferably a stranger. Hybrid vigor is much welcome with crops like rice, the common staple of billions of people all over the world.

What about “Golden Rice”? SRO is not into it that I know, but Asia Rice is into it. Now then, my advice is for Asia Rice to play safe:

In Asia, propagate the eating of Golden Rice as a health Option, not a Unidirection.

More. I edited and produced for SRO the UPLB Vanguards’ book Soldiers & Scientists (2012, 205 pages), where in Chapter 17 (“Santi Obien, The Mother Of PhilRice,” pages 182-183), I wrote:

In one email, I had the sudden insight and I told SRO: “Sir, don’t plant a tree – plant a thousand!”

Picking up from there, his message to his Vanguard brods is this:

Remember, brods, this Golden Anniversary will never happen again in our lifetime! Let's enjoy life to the full.

Yes, “plant a tree” can only be assumed to be in the plural form, but if that’s what we mean, why not say it? Thousand trees will be meaningful, more meaningful than just a tree.

Yes, I have and am still planting trees in our mountain farm in Bugnay. I guess I must have planted over a thousand mahogany and a hundred Gmelinas, a hundred atis and more of mango MMSU gold, 300 bananas (lacatan) – except that the farm has suffered from typhoons and droughts.

Yes, let us plant thousands of trees to make the scenery green to greener… to give us food, to shelter the birds, and hold the water from being lost to the rivers and creeks.

And then we can live forever!

Personal history: With SRO’s advance of P50K for my editing and digital publishing the above Vanguards’ book, I bought myvery first laptop. And that is how, with my love for digital writing, I shall live forever!@517

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