PH Transformation – Via Ron Amos Jr’s “Cultural Revolution” Or Frank A Hilario’s “Agri-Cultural Revolution”?

Thursday morning, 29 April 2021, at about 0830 hours, I read Ron Amos Jr’s “The Need For A Cultural Revolution” as his “Transit Dialog” Facebook post, all 722 words excluding byline, and I have been moved to respond via this essay – because what Mr Amos is sharing is 100% problem and 0% solution!

Mr Amos says:

What we need is to reimagine and reinvent the country and ourselves: a cultural revolution that will create not only our identity but also our unified spirit. How we do it is by transitioning from the medieval age of rule by influence, wealth, creed, and power towards a society that willingly balances the individual and the community, freedom and restraint, and privileges and duties.

How do we do ALL that? Mr Amos is not saying. The best that he says towards a solution is this, “A Call To Action:”

So as not to point fingers, we all start within ourselves – our backyards, bloodlines, and even barkadas. Our leaders need a change of mind from preserving their status quo to favoring the people’s welfare; the people need to mature as responsible members of society.

Indefinable. Imprecise. Indefinite. Even God had to be specific as to what He wanted His people to do, and so He came up with The Ten Commandments! And we are still disobeying them.

Mr Amos says, “Has anyone noticed that force or periods of strife unified some of the most progressive nations today, such as The United States of America, China, the UK, and Japan?” Ah, Mr Amos, indeed they are progressive countries, but at the expense of hundreds of millions of people. We need to do more than those!

Mr Amos’ Cultural Revolution has set me to thinking about an Agri-Cultural Revolution – by Simultaneously Cultivating the Soil and the Mind.

Thus:

Farming begins by Cultivating the Soil. Today, we must learn to cultivate it in such a way as to allow the natural processes to work themselves out. Keeping the environment sound.

We must do trash farming to help the soil regenerate itself naturally – and the farms to produce much healthy foods and the farmers rewarded handsomely.

Living continues by Cultivating the Mind. We must financially assist farmers so that they avoid usury that denies them the fruits of their labor.

We must increase the efficiency of harvesting, postharvest handling, storage, and marketing of produce, so that farmers are not taken advantage of by merchants.

Community living is promoted by social justice. We must encourage farmers, villagers & others to become members of cooperatives and support farming via those coops. That is all the PH cultural revolution necessary – and it should be painless.

We have millions of farmers and their families; therefore, an Agri-Cultural Revolution that I have just summarized should catapult the Philippines into a country Filipinos would be happy about.

And all that falls within what Secretary of Agriculture William Dar  calls the New Thinking for Agriculture. We are on our way to the Promised Land!@517

The World Press Prize Rappler’s Maria Ressa Should Be Pursuing In Her Journalism

Let me deal with the YES first. Yes, CEO of Rappler Maria Ressa is going to receive a world-class award in a few days, the “UNESCO/Guillermo Cano World Press Freedom Prize for 2021.”

The source of the news is ANN (Author Not Named, “Rappler’s Maria Ressa Gets Prestigious UNESCO Press Freedom Award[1],” Rappler.com). UNESCO made the announcement on Tuesday, 27 April. She will receive the award on Sunday, 02 May – the World Press Freedom Day will be celebrated the day after, Monday, 03 May.

She won the World Press Freedom Prize for her previous & present “unerring fight for freedom of expression,” ANN says. She is “set to receive a prestigious press freedom prize from UNESCO for her fight for free speech in the Philippines, serving as a model for journalists under siege around the world.” The UNESCO prize, worth $25,000, “recognizes outstanding contributions to the defense or promotion of press freedom especially in the face of danger.”

Let me deal with the NO next. No, Maria Ressa is not going to receive the highest award she can get – because she has not set sight on it, and UNESCO has not thought of it. The award? I shall now invent and call it “The Good Press World Freedom Prize.” The prize is $1,000,000 (1 million). The Good Press Prize “recognizes outstanding contributions to the promotion of the public good in the face of hunger.”

On the one hand, the World Press Prize is earned by journalistic exposés – of course, that is accomplished “in the face of danger” because the journalist is digging out political dirt!

On the other hand, the Good Press Prize would be earned only with scientific and technological knowledge & tools exposed by development journalists. Maria Ressa is a journalist digging out the private bad, while what the world needs now are journalists digging out the public good!

In its own website, UNESCO itself says, “Information is a public good.” So why is it not sponsoring a world-wide competition among journalists for bringing out information for the public good and not for bringing out the politicians’ private bad? That is to say, UNESCO is missing its own message, or not listening to it!

I agree. Maria Ressa deserves the World Prize, according to the current yardstick of UNESCO. A brave lady.

If she changes perspective and goes after information as a public good? An intelligent lady.

Since I am an agriculturist, let me concentrate on that. I mean by “public good” any information about the technologies & systems for producing, postharvest handling, processing, storage and marketing of farm produce, that is, crops and animals – as well as fishery products.

Maria Ressa will then be espousing the fight in the Philippines for the public to be informed of discovered knowledge – scientific findings translated into popular language the people can see the need of and understand what they have to do for their own social good – she serving as model for journalists serving the public good around the world!@517

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[1]https://www.rappler.com/bulletin-board/maria-ressa-gets-unesco-press-freedom-award-2021?fbclid=IwAR2-BqC8JvIrxBtlBtTe7SxDncc0vXmhdt5bhh35hrma3Qz1ZcqZQiRfBxw

Science Reporting – Please Be Careful With My Art!

 

This note comes from me, not from American journalist Neil deGrasse Tyson; I just needed the sign “The problem with science journalism.” In America, they have different and bigger problems in journalism! We think big; they think Bigger.
(image[1] from Big Think)

Mentioning neither the name of the PH journalist here, nor sex, the news story is titled “DoST Bares 100 Completed Innovation Projects Amid Covid-19 Pandemic[2]” that appeared in the Manila Bulletinissue of 22 April 2021. (DoST is the Department of Science & Technology.)

It’s technically wrong.The journalistic mistake is right there in the headline of the story, in this phrase: “100 Completed Innovation Projects.” But you cannot fully appreciate the error in reporting unless you know more of the standard operating procedures (SOP) of science. Let me now quote the first paragraph (with editing):

The…Philippine Council for Industry, Energy, and Emerging Technology Research and Development (PCIEERD) bared Thursday, April 22, the completion of a total of 100 research, development and innovation projects in the industry, energy, and emerging technologies sectors…

Note that the 100 science projects reported completed in 2020 are not 100% “innovation” but also “research and development (R&D).” R&D SOP requires they will go on under research towards full development of the technology, research not yet completed. In fact, the report says PCIEERD Executive Director Enrico Paringitsays:

Of the 100 completed projects, 15… are ready for technology transfer and commercialization, 16 for deployment to national government agencies, 41 for follow-up researches, 21 for crafting of policy recommendations, and seven under facilities, technology business incubators, and capacity building.

I don’t know about “deployment to national government agencies,” but I’m sure all the 100 are would-be innovation projects, but only 15 are now truly completed and ready for technology transfer – it’s not yet innovation when it’s not ready for technology transfer!

Mr Paringit made his institutional report during the initial & virtual opening of the 3-day Philippine Research, Development, and Innovation Conference (PRDIC), “the country’s first massive, online public presentation of research, development, and innovation projects in the industry, energy, and emerging technology sectors.”

And why was the PRDIC conjured? Mr Paringit says, “We initiated this event to keep the public abreast (of) the development of our cutting-edge solutions that (will help) us usher in the next wave of growth and prosperity. It is through science and technology that we can get our way out of this crisis.”

As a communicator for development, I agree; the PCIEERD is developing innovative technology solutions to bring the country to “the next wave of growth and prosperity” – but the science of reporting – not the fault of PCIEERD I must say – must be correct and accurate!

Now then, I am calling the attention of the Science Editor of the Manila Bulletin – and other Science Editors of other print and digital media – to mind their materials when it comes to science reporting. Today with digital media all over the place, in science, you can play with words and get away with it – but not for long!@517

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[1]https://bigthink.com/videos/writing-about-science

[2]https://mb.com.ph/2021/04/22/dost-bares-100-completed-innovation-projects-amid-covid-19-pandemic/?fbclid=IwAR2yWe_yNVsF1uhMG-x1gjomb_u2BnqLy2fwlCppdmN1MRPUHhe3Vvo2jwM

“Earth Day 2021” Is Too Big It’s Not Fillable! In The First Place, It’s Not Feelable

Today, Thursday, 22 April 2021, is designated worldwide as “Earth Day.” Did you know 2021 is 50 years since Earth Day 1970? Today is exactly half a century; what can we celebrate? Nothing to be proud of! Even the website earthday.orgis not celebrating, just listing the years of events or something. What we have is a static Earth Day!
(Original “Earth Day” image[1] from PNGhut.com)

“Earth Day 1970 gave a voice to an emerging public consciousness about the state of our planet.” Now, 50 years later, that voice may be louder, but it’s still just a voice crying in the wilderness of nonchalance, non-science.

“30 years on, Earth Day 2000 sent world leaders a loud and clear message: Citizens around the world wanted quick and decisive action on global warming and clean energy.” Nothing doing.

“As in 1970, Earth Day 2010 came at a time of great challenge for the environmental community to combat the cynicism of climate change deniers, well-funded oil lobbyists, reticent politicians, a disinterested public, and a divided environmental community with the collective power of global environmental activism.” That “environmental community” did not win any battle.

25,550 days since the beginning – and that’s all we can count: days! As my copywriter self is almost as old as Earth Day, 1974, with Tony Zorilla’s Pacifica Publicity Bureau with Nonoy Gallardo as Creative Director, I know that the Earth Day celebration was off-the-markright from the beginning:

There was no graspable symbol with which to identify one’s effort at celebrating or pushing for a magnificent Earth Day to come one day, no doable symbolization, no immediately measurable achievement to go after. No powerful slogan to move mountains in every energy-hungry country. So? Nothing to celebrate.

Is the Covid-19 pandemic lockdown good for Earth Day because of the restrictions in travel and, therefore, limited use of fossil fuels that give off climate change gases? Car owners will learn they can’t have their cake and eat it too. I hope so!

As an agriculturist, in agriculture, I can give you a measurable yardstick of whose results we can all be celebrating each year Earth Day, also known as “Climate Change” – non-use by farmers of chemical fertilizers, up to zero point zero. That would reduce much, much the climate change gases that go up the atmosphere every second of the day.

Is “Zero Chemical Fertilizers” doable? Absolutely! But no country in the world has done it, despite the scientific knowledge, because politicians – and academicians – are afraid of Big Brother chemical companies!

Fear is the enemy of freedom. You have the freedom to choose which fertilizer to use. How much organic fertilizer did you use today? You can ask that question any day of the year and you know you are contributing to the celebration of a Happy Earth Day sooner than 50 years!

But that is only for Agriculture. What about for the World at Large? Today, I cannot yet coin a slogan for Earth Day. The best is yet coin!@517

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[1]https://pnghut.com/search/celebrating-earth-day

ComDev – Taking Photographs Is Important. So Is Taking Care Of Them

Photographs are not only important in what I do – which is communication for development (ComDev) – they are necessary. You cannot communicate development without photographs!

Today, Friday, 16 April 2021, after about 3 hours, I finalized assigning to folders by subject matter my 21-year collection of digital photographs totaling 16,500 plus. In ComDev, which I invented in 1980, a creative writer must be a photographer himself.

Now, do you necessarily intently study how to compose each shot in taking a picture? Not if you have a digital camera like mine – Lumix FZ100  with Intelligent Auto (IA) – you just point and shoot. What about lighting and focus and speed? The IA takes care of all those. I bought my camera for P19K cash early 2012, and it’s still good. (In any case, it paid for itself immediately because I had a one-man contract to produce a coffee-table book – write, edit, take more photographs, do the layout up to desktop publishing next to commercial printing. That was the coffee-table book The Filipino Farmer Is Bankable to celebrate the Silver Anniversary of the Agricultural Credit Policy Council (ACPC); that was when Jovita Corpuz was Executive Director of ACPC. About 90% of the text was mine; half the number of the images of that 144-page book also mine. The book’s total budget? P1M. Photography is joyful in more ways than one!

Meanwhile, on my Windows 10 background slideshow, I’m watching the changing of scenes on 2 screens: my Lenovo ThinkPad laptop, 14-inch screen, side by side with my external monitor ViewSonic, 20-inch screen. Both screens full photographs on close-ups, all those images mine. Enjoy!

Photography is a talent I began to add in 1975, when I was Editor In Chief of the 3 publications of the Forest Research Institute (FORI): monthly newsletter Canopy, quarterly technical journal Sylvatrop, and quarterly color magazine Habitat, which I patterned after the American National Geographic. My team visited many places in the Philippines to collect images for those stories, articles and papers. In-between takes, I asked my FORI photographer about photography, and he was not selfish with his knowledge and experience. Later, I myself studied photography by reading pamphlets – and studying the great paintings of the old European masters for their composition, foreground, background, and “lighting” (highlights). Did anyone tell me to do that? I did.

(Note that I am self-taught as a creative writer, editor and layout artist in the old-fashioned way, from 1965 to 1985. On Innocents Day 1985, I began to teach myself digital writing (word processing) with WordStar v1. In 1987 or thereabouts, I began teaching myself Microsoft Wordv1; through the years Microsoft Officetaught me desktop publishing, including formatting and layouting of images, pages etcetera.)

I now have in a holding folder Photos Much, 17 subfolders of photographs, by name: Albay Mayon, Asingan, Church, Farm & Home, Hilario Family, Los Baños, Malvar Organics, Miscellaneous, My Room & Me, Native Animals Summit, PhilRice UPLB, Reunions, Rice & Rice, Rural Views, UPLB Campus, Villa De Acuzar, and Windows Collage.

Loving it all!@517

Secretary William Dar Dreams Of A PH Database On Agriculture, ADING – Perfect Match For OpAPA!

On 27 January 2021, the press release came out from the Department of Agriculture(DA) titled “DA Taps State Schools For Food Security Policy Research Projects[1],” data-gathering efforts commonly aiming at creating a regional database for agricultural and rural development, urgently for national food security.

The collaboration is another initiative of the DA under its Agriculture Dialogue and Information Network Groups (ADING) Program “that aims to further strengthen and improve public trust and confidence in the Department.” Note: “Ading” in Ilocano means “younger sibling.” Now, not only the aim but the name is perfect – I am thinking of the 17-year old proposal of Mr Dar himself that he called “Open Academy for Philippine Agriculture” (OpAPA), which he advocated in 2003 when he was still Director General of the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) – with ADING and OpAPA 2021, we have a family of science knowledge banks with Mr Dar as father!
(“Open Learning” image[2] from Frugalmomeh.com)

Under the partnership agreement, the DA will provide funding of P1.5 million to each of the state universities and colleges (SUCs) for data and information gathering on, among other things, (1) impact of DA’s programs on target communities, and (2) technology utilization by farmers and fishers in every region.

The University of the Philippines through the National College of Public Administration and Governance (UP-NCPAG), through Project Team Leader Alex Brillantes, will lead the development of sampling design, research protocol, and data collection instruments that will be used by the SUCs in conducting their knowledge searches.

Separately thinking, once all the sets of data are in and processed into knowledge bits & pieces for Internet searches, in In my mind, OpAPA 2021 will answer all questions, English or Taglish, such as:

Which hybrid rice to plant? Where? How much? Whom to ask?

How do I save on expensive inputs: seeds, fertilizers, cultivation, spraying, harvesting, drying, marketing?

How can a cluster, association, cooperative help my farming?

Which vegetables, fruits, flowers are profitable to grow?

How can I farm if I don’t have enough money?

What do I do when I see a number of insects crawling on my rice plants?

What farm crops can be intercropped with a standing coconut grove?

I want to farm, but I don’t know anything about farming – where do I begin?

I fell in love with OpAPA the first time I saw her, sometime in 2003, when I was hired as a consultant for PhilRice. And I was so smitten that within a week or so, I wrote a book dedicated to bring her to life:

The Geography Of Knowledge. TGoK.

I still have an e_copy of that book, 198 pages, which I conceptualized and wrote all by myself. I submitted the whole manuscript to my direct boss – nameless here, forevermore – and nothing came out of it. I don’t think the PhilRice Executive Director ever saw it. Na-tigok!

With OpAPA 2021, Science with a development face should triumph in Philippine agriculture inclusive of the small farmers!@517

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[1]https://www.da.gov.ph/da-taps-state-schools-for-food-security-policy-research-projects/?fbclid=IwAR1_lZr3Wc8zbU1KWcRC_DadDXGBkrxid40gcK8T62jgWczWRIncjVAV5yA

[2]https://www.frugalmomeh.com/2014/09/education-flexibility-thompson-rivers-university-open-learning.html

Communication For Development: Lessons In Photography As, Surprise, Lessons In Better Writing!

Writer Frank A Hilario is highly original, yes. Creative, he invented Communication for Development (ComDev) 40 years ago when he was Editor in Chief of Habitat, a deliberate look-alike of the American National Geographic, published by the Forest Research Institute based at UP Los Baños. Today, from him, you can improve your writing by learning a lesson or two in photography!

Now look closely at my photograph above, digitally transformed into 3 parts: trees, ground of grass, flowers. That’s how your story looks like usually: Promising but failing to deliver!

Inspired by Erniein Sesame Street, your first lesson in writing is that a story has 3 major parts: Beginning, Middle, End. Equivalents in your story: Foreground, Field, and Background.

Note that the Foreground should be Attractive – a mix of colors growing, as if celebrating their sight of the Field. In the above image, I clouded it up so that you will get the picture!

The usual news story today is either negative or shocking, vintage The Manila Times, founded by Thomas Gowan, an Englishman living in the Philippines. Wikipedia tells us “The paper was created to serve mainly the Americans who were sent to Manila to fight in the Spanish-American War[1].” So, the perspective of Times’ stories was “Fight!” To embolden soldiers and readers so they will ask for more. Peacetime, that’s bad journalism.

Time to apply my ComDev:

The Beginning of your story should be able to catch the reader’s attention by being positive, welcoming, if not colorful. Negative, shocking or threatening is the usual news story, opinion piece, or highlight of today’s media. You don’t need Creativity there – all you need is Negativity!

Importantly:

The Beginningshould be a problem that looks solvable, to be fulfilled when in the Middle.

The Middleof your story should be the encouraging narrative you want to relate, to which you attracted readers via your Beginning.

The Endof your story should be the denouement, the resolution of the unfolding story you told in the Middle.

If you started with an un/stated promise of good in your Beginning, the End should now go back to it and point to its fulfilment – or the promise of something good or better – or what else needs to be done to complete a beautiful picture.

Now, look at my unretouched photograph below. It’s a scene from the UP Los Baños campus, shot with a not-so-advanced Sony camera on 08 July 2007 at 0946 hours. The undivided, beautiful image I show here is to inspire you to write your beautiful news story, column or essay on Philippine agriculture.

One of the photography lessons Biju Arayakkeel gives in his “10 Storytelling Lessons From Photography[2]” (October 2020, Toastmaster.org) is this:

“As a storyteller, I want to share a compelling story that can touch the hearts of my audience, inspire them, and leave them with something to ponder and act on.”

Positive, Inspiring, if possible Creative. Go, ComDev, go!@517

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[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Manila_Times

[2]https://www.toastmasters.org/magazine/magazine-issues/2020/oct/storytelling-lessons-from-photography