Am very glad to note that PhilRice won the 2019 PH Government Best Practice Focus Awardfrom the Development Academy of the Philippines, DAP[1]. According to Donna Cris Corpuz, the DAP award was for PhilRice’s “client-centric service, specifically serving the country’s rice farmers” (above main image appears with her story). Miss Donna explains:
The scoring was based on the best practice focus areas, which include social and environmental responsibility, strategic planning and deployment, customer and citizen focus, and strategic performance management.
That means PhilRice did an excellent job last year in bringing science to the farmers who texted because they wanted to know more about rice.
Now, that Focus Award looks at the performance of PhilRice bringing the recommendations of experts to farmers on their concerns – but does not look at the farmers’ obtaining Masaganang Ani at Mataas na Kita (Bounteous Harvest & Bountiful Income, my translation), the dream of PH Agriculture under Secretary William Dar/Manong Willie.
So: PhilRice service may be good, but farmer’s performance may be poor – and that should be the main concern of PhilRice!
Miss Donna mentions that this PhilRice digital platform is an offshoot of the Open Academy for Philippine Agriculture, OpAPA – which means the OpAPA is dead. And I cannot accept that.
You see, I was a consultant of PhilRice in 2003, the first year of OpAPA, a digital knowledge program proposed by then Director General William Dar of the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics, ICRISAT, based in India. With Manong Willie now PH Secretary of Agriculture, I do believe OpAPA should not simply be washed away by a flood of ignorance.
I believed so much in the “open academy” concept of OpAPA that I singlehandedly brainchilded a workbook titled The Geography Of Knowledge, 198 pages, which I submitted to the incumbent PhilRice Executive Director on 28 December 2003. Sorry, nothing came out of my book and my proposed intellectual content design for OpAPA, but I still believe that my geography of knowledge is necessary for the luxuriant growth of PH Agriculture today.
This time, let me refer to it simply as Digital Rice. Here are some ideas (superimposed image from Alamy[2]):
Options: You should not assume it is only rice that PhilRice should be concerned with. Never mind that IRRI, which is the Mother of PhilRice, is fixated on rice monoculture – why cannot PhilRice explore rice-based farming systems with other crops such as corn and beans?
Language: IRRI has a knowledge bank, extensive – but everything is for someone who knows technical terms associated with the growing of rice, from heredity (in relation to potential yield), to parent shoot (in relation to maximum tillering capacity that actually determines the yield), to ratooning(that increases yield as well as income) – now, nobody talks about ratooning rice as an option: Why not?
Demos & Trainings: Certainly, Digital Rice can teach anyone anywhere anything he wants to know, even show convincingly the physical meaning of Masaganang Ani along with Mataas na Kita.
We need Digital Rice!@517
[1]https://www.philrice.gov.ph/philrice-text-center-recognized-as-govt-best-practice/?fbclid=IwAR1rVwbSOJarFcOB2iZUoU766PHN1jyXh5RKhkxWQI6JEWnJOhztT-5xcvg
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