Many a previous Secretary of Agriculture, too many to mention, tried to move Heaven & Earth to make the Philippines self-sufficient in rice – they all failed. Today, as I read the available info sheets, I say if we learn from Dalisay Rice, how it is produced by the farmers of Alangalang, Leyte actively & financially assisted by the husband-and-wife team Patrick & Rachel Renucci via the enterprise Chen Yi Agventures, CYA, PH should be self-sufficient in rice next year, 2020!
If you help the farmers help themselves, they will help the country.
In "The Road Less Traveled: From Paris To Leyte" (08 September 2019, PhilStar, philstar.com), Julie Cabatit-Alegre tells the short story of how the life of the CYA couple changed forever after super-typhoon Yolanda wrought havoc and caused untold misery on people, places and properties in Leyte in Central Philippines. The French-Italian husband and Filipina-Chinese wife were both distressed by the scenes and stories on media, and in a little while decided to give up the bright lights they found in Paris and settle on the brown patch of soil called Alangalang in Leyte. To help the Leyteños rise Phoenix-like from the ashes left them by Yolanda.
Among other things, Patrick & Rachel saw many ricefields, but not a single postharvest facility. The Leyteños never thought beyond selling dried palay after harvest. Habits die hard; social habits die even harder.
Thinking now: Give the farmers the business they did notthink they have!
Acting now: The CYA couple arranged with the farmers to grow the locally adapted inbred rice, everything coming from CYA, up to and including packaging the finished product, now called Dalisay Rice.
Dalisay Rice was launched with Secretary of Agriculture William Dar/Manong Willie as guest speaker on 11 September 2019 in Manila. This innovative PH rice product falls under the 1st paradigm, Modernizing Agriculture, that Manong Willie is using to guide all of PH Agriculture. (Above image, lower half: Learn more about his thoughts enjoying reading my literal-literary 269-page ebook Paradigms Lost, Paradigms Regained on Manong Willie's "The Eight Paradigms" within his "New Thinking for Agriculture." Email me for a free copy on/before 17 September 2019; after that, it's US$17/P900/copy.)
Before Dalisay Rice was born, Patrick & Rachel found that the farmers: #1, "were planting very bad seeds"; #2, "lived in a cycle of debt, borrowing money at usurious interest rates"; and #3, had no more laborers to hire, as the young people "would rather work at call centers in the city." #1 gave them bad yields; #2 gave them bad lives; and #3 gave them no choice but to work harder – and yet not any richer.
To help, CYA brought good inbred seeds of rice, loaned money at low interest rates, and mechanized their farming from soil cultivation to harvesting – rice farming no longer needed so many human hands, only those of equipment operators. How can you quarrel with a harvest of 200 cavans/ha?
And those 700 individual farmers began enjoying tenfold incomes!
A miracle wrought from Paris with love.@517
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