Victorias City Forest Park – 3 Radically Different Lessons For PH Agriculture

“Lawyer Converts 40-Hectare Sugarcane Plantation Into Man-Made Forest” – in this almost-5-year old article, our Ramon Magsaysay-award winning journalist friend Zac Sarian is his usual self, telling a success story. Zac tells us:

Did you know that in Victorias City where sugarcane is king, an enterprising lawyer-businessman has transformed a 40-hectare sugarcane plantation into a manmade forest?

The businessman is lawyer Nordy Diploma, 80. In his long 2015 story, which appeared in Agriculture Monthly, which he edits, Zac tells us that in the Nordson Forest Park, Atty Diploma has established (above image I composed from the YouTube presentation[1]) these 3:

(1)   Forest Park

(2)   Gawad Kalinga Village

(3)   Negros Science High School.

Today, as a high school teacher taught at the University of the Philippines’ College of Agriculture, now UP Los Baños, graduating with a BS in Agriculture major in Ag Edu in 1965, and as a creative thinker, I have intuited 3 radically different lessons from Zac’s story, these:

We need a village; we need education, especially science education; and we need a natural environment. Really, we need to learn lessons from these 3 environments:
the environment of a village, evillage;
the environment of science, eScience:
the environment of Mother Nature, eNature.

Absolutely, yes! This is all for the good of PH Agriculture; this is much more than the lopsided inclusive growth model trumpeted by the World Bank – this is the egalitarian inclusive development model broadcast to the world by the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics, ICRISAT, when now-PH Secretary of Agriculture William Dar/Manong Willie was ICRISAT Director General, from 01 January 2000 to 31 December 2014. I am well-acquainted with it, being ICRISAT’s international consulting writer for 8 years, 2007-2014.

As I have pointed out in several essays, inclusive growth gives you Gross Domestic Product, GDP, good for business; inclusive development should give us Gross Domestic Prosperity, GDP², good for all, the prosperity distributed down to those who have less in life, especially the cultivators of the soil.

The lesson of eVillage tells us that it takes a village to nurture a child – all children, even as we have all been children.

The lesson of eScience tells us that we need the wisdom we can derive from experimentations to teach each of us about how to live in harmony with the environment.

And the lesson of eNature tells us that we need the continued blessings of Mother Nature to continue to be blessed by our village and our science.

Now then:

(1)   A hundred success stories are not enough. We need every farmer to succeed, every family to thrive in every village!

(2)   We need to teach in high school the science of living in society. We need to live in harmony with everyone and with everything.

(3)   We need to keep the environment in balance, even as we disturb the soil and go growing our crops & livestock.

Keeping in mind the eVillage, eScience, and eNature, I Frank A Hilario wish you the blessings of 2020’s first Friday the 13th!@517

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