i to i: Art, Science, Path

Farmer Green Bill Gates. Listen, you capitalist laggards!

2009-10-16T09:52:00.015+08:00

DES MOINES, IOWA - Nouveau Riche Farmer Green Bill Gates on Thursday, 15 October, called on the wealthy people and the rich countries of the world to invest more millions on the millions of poor farmers of Africa, Asia and America.

He isn't talking, but I'm sure it's his latest application of his own innovative idea he calls Creative Capitalism. (I've written about it earlier; see my 'Bill Gates, Nobel Prize for Economics 2008!',' October 2008, americanchronicle.com). I've been using Microsoft applications since I can remember 'Alpha' (Word 1); I've been following up his career and software for better or for worse. If I know Bill Gates from his Microsoft days, he's trying to program it as the industry standard.

Putting his money where his mouth is, Bill Gates gets 5 stars from me, a critic of capitalism - and Microsoft. He announced that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation was granting a total of $120 million to 9 pro-poor farmer green groups, according to the news, about his 'call for united action to support world's poorest farmers' (ANN, 15 October, reuters.com):

$15 million, Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa: The AGRA Policy Program

$10 million, American Institutes for Research (AIR): Farmer Voice Radio

$4.7 million, Grameen Foundation: Building a Network of Community Knowledge Workers

$18 million, International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics: Harnessing Opportunities for Productivity Enhancement (HOPE) of Sorghum and Millets

$21.25 million, International Potato Center: Sweet Potato Action for Security and Health in Africa (SASHA)

$10.4 million, New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD) and Michigan State University (MSU): African Biosafety Network of Expertise (ABNE)

$12 million, Partnership for Child Development (PCD): Home-Grown School Feeding

$9.7 million, Professional Assistance for Development Action (PRADAN): Developing Farm-Based Livelihoods in Endemically Poor Regions of India

$19 million, Wageningen University: Putting Nitrogen Fixation to Work for Small-Holder Farmers in Africa (NforAfrica).

I have a problem with that! There's been some mistake, and I don't think I can forgive the one who erred on the side of more.

And I can't decide who the culprit is. Was it the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation who erred greatly, or was it the calculator built into Microsoft Office 2007 that didn't know My Dear Aunt Sally?

You see, now I'm using Bill Gates' programmer-friendly Word 2007 and I have customized it so that I have the icon for Calculate (Formula) on my Quick Access Toolbar above the Ribbon. As Microsoft instructed me as far back as 13 years ago (Word 1997), if I remember right, I typed these amounts as one paragraph, with only a space to separate the numbers and words:

15 million 10 million 4.7 million 18 million 21.25 million 10.4 million 12 million 9.7 million 19 million

and then selected the whole text and clicked Calculate. And what did I get? 120.05 million dollars, or 120,050,000 dollars, which means one of the 9 go-get-granters got an extra 50,000 dollars! In my country's currency, that's about 2,500,000 pesos extra - it must have been the International Potato Center in Peru; look at the last digit in its $21.25 million. That's no joke. It would take me 10 years earning $5,000 every 12 months to make that much money. So, you see, a little mistake goes a long, long way.

No, Bill Gates won't be pleased.

Yes, I'm sure the poor farmers would be pleased. The news was on Bill Gates speaking his mind at the World Food Prize Symposium (ANN, 15 October, allafrica.com). Thinking locally and acting globally, new farmer Bill Gates urged governments, donors, researchers, farmer groups, environmentalists and others to set aside ideologies and unite to help farms boost their yields and farmers increase their incomes so that they can rise above hunger and poverty. The farmers are the ones who feed the world, so why should they remain poor?

Actually, Bill Gates' memo to the rich to help the poor farmers is an old note, not a new message at all. What is new is that he insists that the efforts be:

(a) farmer-guided,

(b) locally adapted, and

(c) economically viable and environmentally sustainable.

Farmer knows best. This is also called The Bottom-to-Top Approach, in contradistinction to the Top-to-Bottom Approach of many an expert. The expert knows more, the farmer knows better!

I didn't know Bill Gates is a farmer at heart, a green farmer at that. Speaking at the World Food Prize Symposium in Des Moines 15 October, held in honor of the 2009 World Food Prize winner Gebisa Ejeta, the Ethiopian scientist who bred a sorghum resistant to drought and the Striga weed, Bill Gates not only said we know-it-all experts have to listen to the illiterate farmers; he also said we have to help those farmers grow their crops on poor soils, get their harvests to the market, and get a fair price for their produce. I say it may help to consider that for producers and creators, a fair price is a human right.

'Melinda and I believe that helping the poorest small-holder farmers grow more crops and get them to market is the world's single most powerful lever for reducing hunger and poverty,' Bill Gates said. If we don't help the farmers enough, in broad daylight we can always watch the display of market forces - the bulls and the elephants degrading the harvests and depressing the incomes of the already poor farmers.

I see that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has a new vision for the better seeds, trainings, market accesses, policies that favor poor farmers. Hence the $120.05 million total grants for higher-yielding sorghum and millet; higher Vitamin A sweet potato; higher-value policies for poor farmers; higher levels of access of knowledge by farmers through the radio and cell phone; higher nutrition for school children; higher vigilance by governments on biotechnologies; higher women's participation in managing land and water in their villages. The $120.05 million is part of a total of $1.4 billion that the foundation has committed to the higher application of the science of agriculture.

Bill Gates remembered the Green Revolution as a successful failure (my term); he did say it succeeded in increasing food and at the same time in increasing the use of fertilizers and irrigation to the levels of abuse. What happened was that the soils were depleted of their wealth of nutrients; the crops became more susceptible to pests, diseases and drought; and farmers became wasteful of water as long as they had it in abundance. On top of all that, the Green Revolution did not help the farmers tap favorable markets to sell their harvests. We experts taught the farmers how to farm but not how to compute!

'The next Green Revolution has to be greener than the first,' Bill Gates said. 'It must be guided by small-holder farmers, adapted to local circumstances, and sustainable for the economy and the environment.'

The poor farmers who? The World Bank says that would be about 750 million people who depend on farming for their (bare) living.

Bill Gates noted that the G20 group of developed countries recently made a 3-year, $22-billion pledge to help solve global hunger by supporting the poor farmers of the world. That's to the G20's credit. Your credit is good, but we need cash. 'It's a great thing that donor nations are focusing on this issue,' Bill Gates said, 'but we need them to spell out clearly what the $22 billion means - how much is old money, how much is new, how soon can they spend it, and when will they do more?'

'When will they do more?' In short, Bill Gates was telling the G20 group of nations that for the millions of poor farmers, $22 billion is only good for peanuts. And only for now.

Bill Gates noted that there are on one hand those who argue for higher productivity without sustainability, and on the other hand those who argue for sustainability without higher productivity. About the ideological wedge (never mind the mixed metaphor), he said:

It's a false choice, and it's dangerous for the field. It blocks important advances. It breeds hostility among people who need to work together. And it makes it hard to launch a comprehensive program to help poor farmers. The fact is, we need both productivity and sustainability - and there is no reason we can't have both.

Bill Gates has turned out to be a better farmer than many a great graduate of high-prestige universities of agriculture around the world, including the University of the Philippines Los Baños where I graduated. And we are talking here of a computer nerd who is a Harvard high school dropout! (Not me.)

He wants strong policy support systems for agriculture from governments. For both poor household and national food security. You can't think of the country without thinking of the poor household.

He wants new crops that can withstand drought and flooding, so that the poor farmers can hope to adapt to climate change. If you can't change the farmer, change his crop.

He wants expanded markets for the poor farmers' produce. You have to teach the farmer marketing, but not make him attend college, if it were the likes of Harvard.

He wants the World Food Programme (WFP) to buy more food from poor farmers for the WFP to stack up for food aid; in fact, the WFP had already bought 17,000 metric tons of food from them. If the rich won't help the poor, help the poor do what they can!

He wants new knowledge broadcast and impact the lives of small farmers. Science is more for the people, and less for scientists.

He wants the cell phone to be a device for reaching and teaching farmers. To make sure farmers can't escape from new knowledge wherever they are.

He wants for farmers more HOPE: harnessing opportunities for productivity enhancement. Hope must spring eternal from the human breast. Higher yields, lower costs, higher incomes - hopefully from the thirsty drylands of Africa and Asia.

He wants sweet potato farmers to live sweeter lives than they have ever tasted. Sweeter than sweet potato.

He wants biotechnology with limits to growth. 'No rules, no borders, no limits' cannot apply to biotechnology. Old-gold conventional breeding has an exalted place among the jewels of high-tech hybridization.

He wants the poor farmers and their children to get enough food and adequate education. (Harvard did grant him a degree, and he values that.)

He wants legumes to enrich the soil as well as enrich the lives of small farmers, to happen like shelling peas.

He wants the women to learn better how to farm, to teach, to sell. So that anything the men can do, the women can do better.

He is thinking like millions of the rich aren't thinking.

He wants more for more. I hope that as he throws 12,005,000,000 more coins into The Fountain of More Knowledge, his wish is our command.

Bill Gates would be pleased.

Noynoy's Dorothy. Aquino's Yellow Brick Road. Oz!

2009-09-15T20:58:00.016+08:00

Revised 0858 hours 17 September
MANILA – Wizard of Oz? Emerald City? On 23 September will occur a one-night screening all over the US of The Wizard of Oz to celebrate its 70th anniversary (ncm.com). The movie has been remastered; on DVD, it will be available for download 29 September. Netflix will screen the newly restored classic online 3 October free (Carrie Specht, filmjerk.com). We'll get to all that later.

In the meantime, let me entertain you with my trick basketball shot. An hour or so ago (14 September), I was just reading about one of my favorite people, Phil Jackson, who brought the best out of Michael Jordan and the rest of the Chicago Bulls team into those unforgettable, historic age of long ago. 6 Championships for the Chicago Bulls. How did Phil Jackson do it? Adam Fluck referred to what I call the Jackson MO (Modus Operandi) as a 'holistic approach' (nba.com). The holistic approach sees the whole, like this: The ball is greater than the sum of its parts!

So, I'm a basketball fan after all? No, I'm a great fan of the greats. I neither play basketball nor watch it, but I love Michael Jordan; he's the best. I neither play nor watch golf, but I love Tiger Woods; he's the best. I neither play nor watch tennis, but I love Maria Sharapova – yes, she's my Champion and she's on a slump; and yes, it happens to the best! I am neither in India nor in ICRISAT, but I love William Dar, a great Captain of the winning Team ICRISAT. He happens to be the best.

And now the cat's out of the bag. I pity Senator Benigno 'Noynoy' Aquino III because the ball is in his hands and he has neither the holistic approach nor the winning team! And he doesn't know he's Dorothy Gale yet; or, is he? Gender doesn't matter.

First things first. Those of you who are pushers of Noynoy for President, you should have been greatly disappointed with his 'Acceptance Speech' at Club Filipino at Greenhills, Mandaluyong City on 9 September 2009. It is a romantic piece – a romantic failure. On 2 counts:

(1) It fails to unite the people.
(2) More importantly, it fails to define the stakes for the stakes-holders.

Noynoy simply says, after running around the bus, yes, he is willing to get onboard and carry on the fight. (For the complete text of the original speech in Tagalog and my own English translation, click here: 'Noynoy's Intent.')

Noynoy says:
I accept the challenge of the people.
I also accept the words, wish and will of my parents.
I accept the responsibility of carrying on the fight for the country.
I accept the challenge of leadership in this fight.

I ask: 'What fight?'

Ah, the 64-million-dollar question. Dollars. And why does my metaphor use an American capitalist tool of commerce? Because I know that we can ignore the American capitalist in language and in politics only at our own disadvantage. English enables us to engage in the commerce of ideas with the rest of the whole world – our very own language Tagalog encumbers us. 'Dito nagagapos ang kahabag-habag / isang pinag-usig ng masamang palad' (Francisco Balagtas, Florante at Laura). 'Here in shackles one to be pitied / One who bad luck had persecuted' (my translation). In using Tagalog to announce himself to his legion of fans, Noynoy Aquino was acting like a celebrity that he is, and dangerously limiting himself to those whom I have already called tongue-tied nationalists – they link talking in Tagalog to nationalism and reject the value of any other language, like Ilonggo and Ilocano (click here for my 'Unggoy, Ka Freddie. Aguilar must decrease, Charice must increase'). On second thought: Perhaps Noynoy is not at all at home with the English language? Then he cannot be at home with other leaders of other countries, like GMA is with Barack Obama, so how can he speak for the Philippines abroad?

I ask again: 'What fight?'

He says, 'Fight for the country,' but he does not define what is the fight; he does not tell us the rules, the borders, the limits. Is he implying it's a free-for-all?

If he says, 'Fight corruption,' he's only against; in other words, he will cure the disease by cutting off the signs, kicking out the corrupt, exactly like cutting off cancerous cells in the hope of curing the cancer. Not looking for the cause of the disease and getting rid of that.

If he says 'Fight poverty,' he's still missing the point – the poor are not the problem. It's the system: The opportunities are not distributed equally. It's the perspective: The schools teach (and the parents encourage) the children only to study and look for a job after graduation, never to study and create a job for themselves and, in so doing, create jobs for others. We look for a job, that's why we cannot find it! Poverty is the sign, not the illness. It's the patronage: Politicians encourage squatters for votes; squatters encourage politicians for food and fun. It's the madness in the method: Parties don't want automated voting because nobody can miscount the votes – don't discount that they enjoy the miscount. Figures don't lie, but cheaters do figure.

If he says, 'Fight overpopulation' and I'm around, he will hear from me at once, wit or without. You see, I have 12 children from 1 wife and 0 extra-marital affairs. To those who favor the Reproductive Health Bill, I dedicate this simple logic. Argument in favor: Assume we are now about 90 million Filipinos; the carrying capacity of the Philippines is only 50 million mouths, no wonder there are millions of poor Pinoys. Argument against: When we were only 50 million, why were there millions of poor Filipinos? The number is the sign, not the disease.

If he says, 'Fight abuse of women' and 'Fight child abuse' and 'Fight illegal recruitment' and 'Fight terrorism' – he will still have missed the target. And I'm surprised that he misses the target when it's big, huge, gigantic – if you are holistic about it. It has to do with faith; I shall now borrow from the Prayer of St Francis of Assisi and give you what I call The Christian's Prayer:

The Christian's Prayer
Lord, help me become an instrument of Your Peace:
To go ahead and just do it!
To love and not to hate.
To pardon and not to injure.
To believe and not to doubt.
To hope and not to despair.
To seek light and not darkness.
To seek joy and not sadness.
More to console and less to be consoled.
More to give and less to receive.
More to love and less to be loved.

And yes, as I said earlier, it also has to do with the culture; it also has to do with the system.

It's the culture. There is the Filipino 'heritage of smallness' (Nick Joaquin, getrealphilippines.com). We have romanticized 'Isang Kahig, Isang Tuka' (One Scratch, One Peck). In the very narrow street where we live, there are 10 candy stores within a walking distance of about 200 meters – how can any of them grow? The explanation: They don't really want to grow; they just want to earn a little ('kaunti lang'). And that's exactly what they get.

There is no Filipino cultivated culture of greatness, no national yearning for greatness, except when the Great Ilocano Ferdinand E Marcos ruled that 'This nation can be great again!' But he disappointed himself; and we disappointed ourselves.

What we have today is, if we believe the media, a national yearning for solving the problem by changing the problem. Are the public officials corrupt? Change them! Of course, we've been doing that since Manuel Luis Quezon was President. And we still have corrupt public officials, not to mention corrupt private officials. That's another problem.

There is also the heritage of mendicancy of the Filipino. In labor unions, there is the mentality to demand for higher pay instead of to think and work better so that the company earns more and they will be deserving of more. The other side of mendicancy is patronage, that is, the rich set up situations and encourage the poor to be dependent on them. The extended family system also works that way.

It's also the system. There is too much power in the President; there's too much filibuster in the Senate; there is too much bluster in the House. That's why I'm in favor of the parliamentary system; I believe my kailian (townmate) from Pangasinan, former President Fidel Valdez Ramos is in favor. (Aside from GMA being in his disfavor, is Senator Noynoy in favor of anything? Yes, Reproductive Health, and he's single.) I'm in favor of the Federalism of Senator Aquilino Pimentel, from Cagayan De Oro City. Both are designed to strip the power of Imperial Manila, the wellspring of graft and corruption, not to mention incompetence.

And finally, I ask: 'What leadership?' Where is Noynoy Aquino in all that? Like the movie The Wizard of Oz, he should be remastering his presentation. He should be building his team. He should be imitating Phil Jackson and being holistic in his approach to his dream of becoming President of the Philippines. To do that, he should do more than the Jackson MO; he should do the Noynoy VMO – Vision, Mission, Objectives. To do that, he needs a team like the Chicago Bulls, the likes of Phil Jackson as coach, his own Michael Jordan as star player and Team Captain in truth if not in title, his own Dennis Rodman for rebounds, his own Scottie Pippen for forward and all-around, his own John Paxson for drama.

In his 'Acceptance Speech,' Noynoy was neither accepting a current Vision nor presenting one; therefore, to accept the Mission 'To carry on the fight' is improper and ill-considered, not to mention it's ungrammatical – no antecedent. To fight for what Vision? You can't have a Mission without a Vision for your Country; a Vision is not only for Yourself, otherwise it's blurred. And you can't have Objectives without a Mission.

That's Noynoy's Colossal Problem – if he cannot solve it, he will prove to be a Colossal Fool. Without a Vision, our young men shall fantasize, dream dreams and, on waking, dream some more. How can you have a Mission to bring about the Vision you don't have? How can you define your Objectives when you can't formulate your Mission because you can't describe your Vision because you don't have any?

The problem with Senator Benigno 'Noynoy' Aquino III is that he began to travel the road to the presidency of his country by romanticizing it. He was listening to voices crying in the wilderness along the Yellow Brick Road:

'Noy, let's go President.
If we have 1 million signatures, will you say Yes?
Eh, if 2 million, will that suffice?
May the ghosts of your Mother and Father visit you if you let this chance go by!
'Someone told me that if my decision is right, the path to travel will be easy.'
Are you running now?
Thanks to you, we can dream again.

Your young men shall dream dreams. Then they all have to wake up!

Noynoy says:
He (the boy) pointed to a new singer, singing rap-style but the song had a social dimension.

I ask: 'What social dimension?'

You're not Harry Potter, Noynoy, no. Or you can be – but you'll have to train. You will need years to train and bring out the magic, the best in you. That will be 6 years; somebody else will have to be President of the Philippines in 2010.

In any case, Noynoy, the Yellow Brick Road to the presidential palace at Malacañang is paved with honest intentions, but honest intentions are not good enough.

Yellow, yellow, yellow! Here then is my political interpretation of the Wizard of Oz applied in the Philippine setting. Noynoy, your father Ninoy Aquino was the Yellow Hero: After 3 years of self-exile, he wanted to return and be welcomed with yellow ribbons tied around old, old trees; but they assassinated him even before he could set foot on his old homeland again. Your mother Cory Cojuangco Aquino was the Yellow Lady: She could not be cheated of the presidency in 1986, and she brought forth the Yellow Brave Lion – its silent roar and rage drove fear into the heart of the enemy.

You are now The Boy Who Cried Yellow. Noynoy, you think that the way to Malacañang is a Yellow Brick Road. It is. But it's not like you think it all ends up with, not like Dorothy thought it would be as she thought of how wonderful it would be to finally meet the Wizard of Oz.

Like Dorothy, you are lost; now you are told to seek the wisdom of the Wizard of Oz. It is a Yellow Brick Road you are told to travel and when you reach the Emerald City, you will find that the Wizard of Oz does not have the magical powers he has been reputed to possess, and someone tells you that what you seek has been inside you all the time, the way to get back home.

But before that, while on your way to the Emerald City, you will have to save the Scarecrow, save the Tin Woodman, save the Cowardly Lion. And you will have to answer for yourself who the Scarecrow really is, who the Tin Woodman represents, who the Cowardly Lion can be. You will have to study the power of the metaphor.

You will need a Good Witch of the North. Who could that be? And just to put in a bit of virtue-less reality, you will have a Wicked Witch of the West. Guess who!? And the Wizard of Oz in your story, who do you think he is? He will be exposed as someone who is less than truthful. No, I'm sure it's not Jun Lozada, but he's a good candidate.

That's your Dream Team, Noynoy. You need a Dream Team. Learn from Phil Jackson and Michael Jordan and the rest of the Chicago Bulls. You have to be the Team Captain. Remember, Noynoy, you are Dorothy. You're not the Wizard of Oz –unless of course you are also a pretender to the throne. Dorothy was just a kid and she got lost like you, and she was also an orphan, no parents to go back to.

And you will lose your Silver Shoes before you get home; who or what is that? You will need a loyal running dog Toto, or Tuta; who can s/he be?

Go home, Noynoy! You have no choice. Home is where your heart is. Not unlike Dorothy, all you have to do is clap your hands and say out loud the name of your destination, and you will be there in an instant: '__________!'

Which one will you shout: Philippines or Malacañang? The enigma is that you can't have one without the other.

US teen suicide. Christianity & dying to oneself

2009-08-10T16:38:00.006+08:00

Revised 12 August 2009 Wednesday at 0414 hours

MANILA – Today, 09 August 2009, Sunday, I picked up and couldn't stop reading to the end a book my daughter Graciela left around and which I learned later she has borrowed from her sister Neenah: Pitch Black (Color Me Lost) by Melody Carlson (2006, Cubao QC: Navigators Ministries, 202 pages). It's about friendship; it's also about becoming and behaving as a Christian. It's also about teenage suicide, and it strikes me that Jason Harding worried too much about his grades in school he actually killed himself by taking an overdose, 80 to 90 pills of Tylenol, that one for pain and fever with the generic name acetaminophen. I learn from the book that suicide is itself generic among American teenagers, being the second leading cause of death among youth in the United States – but not in the Philippines, thank God. Civilization does that to you. An overdose of Tylenol irreversibly damages the liver. That should teach everyone that life depends on the liver.

Entirely fiction, the novel Pitch Black makes good, light reading. It's serious and it's funny at the same time. I love it. Morgan writes as she contemplates suicide:

I hope I can remember to write all this down when the time comes. I hate to think of leaving anything undone. Well, besides my life, that is.

Grace is talking on the phone to Morgan (the I), co-conspirators in their little suicide pact, after Morgan has changed her mind about committing suicide:

'Dying is pretty permanent, isn't it?'
'Jason's not coming back,' I say.
She sighs.
'So, are you going to be okay tonight?' I ask.
'As in, I won't kill myself?'
'Yeah.'
'Not tonight, Morgan. I'm too tired. I just want to go to sleep.'

Teenagers have problems, and so do their parents, and neither side understands the other. My daughter Neenah is Protestant and Graciela and I and my wife are Roman Catholic. We have problems, and they are not necessarily religious. Pitch Black argues for living out your problems, whether you are a teenager or mother or grandmother – in this book, the father happens to be a 'distant' relative – and gently nods the reader towards 'finding Jesus,' that is, accepting Jesus into your life and becoming a Christian.

'God gives us each other to help carry the load when the weight gets too heavy,' says Pastor Orlander. Maybe, but it's not easy to tell when. It's easier to think of life as either black or white, Christian or non-Christian. There comes a time when all you see is black, or white, or gray. No colors. In any case, life's not that easy, even if you believe in Jesus.

The book is written in the first person. The storyteller, Morgan Begstrom, seriously considers suicide herself, in a suicide pact, with her friends Seth Blum and Grace Benson, 3 friends encouraging each other. What are friends for?!

'Peer pressure can be overwhelming,' says Detective Mason. It is always overwhelming, even among professionals, even among scientists who are supposed to be critical thinkers. I should know; I've worked with them for at least 34 years.

Seth has the gloomy outlook in life, and Grace, being 'racially mixed,' has been receiving racist treatment herself. And Morgan? She is no ordinary 17-year old girl. She is bright and breezy. But her parents are divorced; her Mom is having an affair with a man young enough to be her son; her brother is heavy into drugs. She takes all that by herself. And that's when friendship can be deadly. An insight I have gained from the book is that suicide can be contagious as a disease is, if you have frustrated youth around town and one of your friends decides to say, 'Goodbye, cruel world' and invites you to come on in, the water's fine.

Morgan is vulnerable, to say the least. Earlier, she tells Jason, her best platonic boy friend:

God just doesn't make any difference. If anything, God is a setup for me to expect that things are going to change and get better. And then they just keep getting worse. So why bother?

She egged him toward suicide, didn't she? In an email that day, Jason wrote he wanted to talk to her. But Morgan didn't check her email. Now she's saying, too late: 'When Jason really needed a friend – needed me – I wasn't there for him. I make myself sick!' She adds: 'If only I hadn't been so self-absorbed and pathetic.'

At a prayer meeting after Jason's suicide, which Morgan attends, Pastor Marcus Nickerson makes the point that when Jesus said, 'If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves, and take up their cross, and follow me' (Mark 8: 34 NRSV), Jesus was really talking about spiritual death, dying to oneself, and that we needed to do it everyday, that is, 'to give up everything for Jesus' sake.' Not physical suicide but spiritual suicide.

Good point. The good pastor explains how one can die to oneself everyday:

When we lay all of our earthly valuables at Jesus' feet, and when we tell him that he is worth far more than all we thought we desired, that's when we truly find ourselves, because that's when we really die to ourselves. And that's when we have real life – the kind of life that no one can take from us – eternal life. For it's only when we die to ourselves that we find true fulfillment in Jesus.

Another good point. But I don't think that's all there is to being a Christian, dying to oneself everyday. It's like I, a Roman Catholic, am going to mass everyday, that's all. Jason Harding prayed a lot too, you know, and then made a mistake, killing himself. As I understand it, being a Christian is nothing personal – it's social.

In any case, the story is that Jason Harding was worried about his GPA, Grade Point Average, or the weighted average of all his grades in his last year in high school, because he wanted it good enough to get him into Princeton U, like his father Gary wanted him to, like his brother Aaron and sister Jessica had done. You commit suicide because of your low GPA? Keeping up with the rest of the family can do you wrong. It's easy to delete a life, but how can you undelete it?

Jason was worried about his grades not being high enough to get him into Princeton to please his father. That was nothing compared to mine when I was in college at the University of the Philippines Los Baños in the early 1960s: in that fateful semester, I had 5 subjects and my grades were Failed, Failed, Failed, Conditional, Conditional. Foolishly falling in love can do that to you. Unlike Jason, I didn't have to please my father – I didn't tell him – but I had to please myself. Those grades automatically qualified me to the degrading status of Extreme Delinquent. In those days, being Extremed, as it was termed then, was the darkest hour of your life as a student – everything was pitch black. You had been kicked out of school. You were ostracized by everyone you knew, or who knew. That was a terrible blow to my ego, a 3rd placer in Grade School and High School (1st Honorable Mention), and a College Scholar at one time. I was readmitted and eventually graduated, thank God, and my nights were not pitch black anymore, but the bruised ego turned into nightmares and daymares – and, day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, there seemed to be no end to my angst.

When I returned to the Roman Catholic fold in 1991, I saw light at the end of the dark tunnel. A pinpoint light to be sure, but it was enough to give me a bit of hope. Pitch black was not pitch black after all. That was all I needed at that time, a bit of hope. I thank God for the Bukás Loób sa Díyos (BLD) Catholic Charismatic Community in Los Baños for helping me hope. BLD aims to open hearts to God.

My wife and I were active at BLD for year, but it still took many more years for my anxieties to leave me completely alone and for the assurance of a loving God to take over my life. Some lessons are difficult to learn. An insight from the book of Melody Carlson: 'People do what they want to do,' says Morgan. 'How can God stop them? He sure didn't stop Jason.' An insight from the book of my life: I think church groups should do less worship services – praising God in songs and prayers, and do more life services – helping people lead lives of truth, beauty and goodness, as well as leading such lives themselves. Like Couples for Christ are doing in their Gawad Kalinga, not merely building houses but building lives, building communities. No Morgan, even if you accept Jesus into your life, you don't just expect that things will change and get better and better by themselves. Don't forget family.

Frenchman Emile Durkheim, the Father of Sociology, studied suicide and religion (emile-durkheim.com). Comparing countries, he made a rather disconcerting discovery: there were much less fewer suicides in Catholic and much more in Protestant countries. From Maurice Halbwachs we learn the explanation (The Causes Of Suicide, 1978, 372 pages, books.google.com.ph):

According to (Emile Durkheim), Catholicism deters from suicide, not because of any particular dogma, but because the Catholic Church creates a close community of life and thought among all its members, by the uniformity of its rites and beliefs and the importance that it attaches to public worship. Thus, the faithful feel themselves to be members of the same body, and the bonds which attach them to their group also hold them to life. The Church's effects upon the faithful does not differ from that of the family over its members. (page 168)

At Jason's grave, Morgan makes a solemn promise:

I promise you, I will do this: I will try to be the best friend that I can from now on. I'll try to follow your example and love and accept others for who they are.

Exactly. 'Love and accept others for who they are.' But oh, Morgan, I can tell you that that is the most difficult thing to do. It's difficult even for those who are members of your own family. Been there, not done that. It took me years, but I have learned to thank God for those I love – and for those I have yet to learn to love. It's a great feeling. Try it sometime!

Yellow ribbons. Cory Aquino & the Colors of Hope

2009-07-26T21:19:00.005+08:00

Revised 28 August at 0807 hours
MANILA – WHO, WHAT, WHERE, WHEN? Let me tell you a little detective story, and it’s all about Corazon ‘Cory’ Aquino, who became the first President of a country ever ensconced by People Power; on the 25th of February 1986, the history-setting Filipinos made her the first female President of an Asian country ever, and she became Time’s ‘Woman of the Year’ (05 January 1987, time.com), making history 3 times in a row. Her favorite color, yellow, became the color of the truth of People Power. ‘Tie A Yellow Ribbon ‘Round The Old Oak Tree’ had been her martyred husband Benigno Aquino Jr’s favored-associated song.

So, for years, yellow pervaded the Philippines and the rest of the world among those who sought peace by way of peace. Then Cory Aquino joined the ‘forces’ calling for the resignation of GMA as President of the Philippines. That was when, instead of yellow, Cory Aquino began to be associated with black & white, apparently believing in the colored mantra of the movement: ‘Because the truth does not come in shades of gray’ (blacknwhite-movement.com).

Researching, what have I found so far? That I have a problem with black & white; that the journalists have problems using black & white as the only colors of truth. And so do the doctors. And so do the friends and children of Cory Aquino.

Last year, Cory Aquino was diagnosed with cancer of the colon (AP, 24 March 2008, cbsnews.com). She began chemotherapy 25 March 2008 for 6 months at the Makati Medical Center, MMC; following the treatment, she underwent surgery to remove parts of her colon 04 May 2009 (blogs.gmanews.tv). She was brought back to MMC 24 June 2009 because ‘she continues to suffer from poor appetite,’ according to her son Senator Benigno 'Noynoy' Aquino III (Maila Ager, 24 June 2009, newsinfo.inquirer.net.ph). The truth has shades of gray. Actually, Cory Aquino continues to suffer from colon cancer, stage 4 (abs-cbnnews.com) and the side-effects of chemotherapy. My research says lack of appetite is only one of the 199 side-effects of chemotherapy (see ‘My Cancer Story,’ 17 May 2009, americanchronicle.com/). Chemotherapy is trying to solve a problem and compounding it 199 times.

‘She’s okay and doing well. She was soundly asleep when I arrived,’ Manila Mayor Alfredo Lim said (Kris Bayos, 24 July 2009, mb.com.ph). Shades of gray. He is not telling the whole truth because it’s not a happy one, and he is not about to accept it. What he said is not black & white.

Margarita Juico, a trusted aide of Cory Aquino, initiated a text brigade calling for people to ‘tie a yellow ribbon’ as proof of concern and care for the ‘widow in yellow’ (Bayos as cited). And they did, festooning some public places with yellow ribbons. Each of those ribbons of yellow was a sign of hope, a silent prayer. Life, impending death, hope are not simply matters of black & white.

‘Let’s continue to pray for the healing and fast recovery of Tita Cory because with God, nothing is impossible,’ said Fr Mark Munda at the healing mass organized by the Manila City government (24 July 2009, mb.com.ph). The color of the possible is neither black nor white. Black is gloomy; white is too pure. In these depressing times, we need the color of hope.

But what is the color of hope? For Michael Hoyle, it’s blue (Christopher Muther, Boston Globe, 19 March 2009, boston.com). For Benjamin Moore, it’s ‘a blazing citron yellow’ (Muther as cited). For Flickr photographer Allure+Desire, ‘Green is the color of hope (and it fits blond hair perfectly’) (flickr.com). For book author Irina Ratushinskaya, ‘Grey Is The Color Of Hope’ (amazon.com). To people in distress in

China

, orange is the color of hope (english.peopledaily.com.cn). Hope has no color; hope has many colors.

What is the color of cancer? So far, modern medicine man has not come up with a cure for cancer. Western medicine likes to trace its history back to Hippocrates (400 BC), calling him Father of Medicine. Do the doctors really know what they think they know? I don’t think so. Hippocrates was much more intelligent than they credit him for. ‘He believed that it was best to leave cancer alone because those who got treatment didn’t survive as long’ (Emory University, cancerquest.org). So, what else is new?

The black & white of it is that even in our times, even advanced chemotherapy is not a cure; it’s only a treatment. There are remissions, and those are sometimes referred to as cures. That’s truth in a shade of gray. A remission is a ‘lessening of intensity or degree’ (American Heritage Dictionary); unfortunately, it’s not a cure. A remission is a ‘period during which the symptoms of a disease abate or subside’ (thefreedictionary.com). The symptoms go; the disease stays.

A cure removes the cause of a disease. When a surgeon operates on you and cuts out the cancerous cells in your body, that’s exactly what he does – removes the diseased cells of your body. That’s all. The operation was successful; unfortunately, the patient lived – with the cause of cancer untouched. Those cancerous cells cannot be mistaken as the cause of your cancer; they are the unmistakable signs of your cancer, that something is wrong with your immune system.

In corruption, public or private, at the top level or at the bottom level, in billions of dollars or hundreds of pesos, the $ and P are not the causes of corruption – greed is. You kick the corrupt out of office, and the greed is still there; you surgically remove the cancerous cells, and the cancer is still there.

So, we turn to God. We pray for a miracle of healing; we go for the instant cure. God, please take away the greed of the world. And: God, please take away the cancer of our father, mother, uncle, aunt, godfather, godmother, or my best friend.

How many of such prayers have God answered? Is God answering your prayers for Cory Aquino? Her son, Senator Benigno Aquino III, says that doctors have told them that his mother is ‘stable’ and that ‘nobody can really say when …’ (Joanne Rae Ramirez, 25 July 2009, philstar.com). Shades of gray. Eldon Cruz, one of Cory Aquino’s sons-in-law, says the family will release a statement on her condition ‘very soon’ (Fe Zamora, 26 July 2009, newsinfo.inquirer.net). Deedee Siytangco, her former spokesman, says ‘She’s okay, she’s still stable’ (Sophia M Dedace, 16 July 2009, gmanews.tv). Kris Aquino, Cory Aquino’s youngest & beloved daughter, says she wants to be with her mother’s side ‘for whatever time left’ (ANN, 19 July 2009, gmanews.tv). All shades of gray.

Now then, allow me to say what others, including her children, don’t want to say: Cory Aquino is dying. That is not a statement of hope; that is a statement of fact. It is a black & white statement, with no shades of gray about it. You don’t like it. I never liked black & white myself. I need the color of hope.

‘Don’t worry. I have lived a full life,’ Cory Aquino said almost a year ago, when she learned she had colon cancer and agreed to chemotherapy. ‘I cannot ask for more’ (quoted by ANN, 02 August 2008, philstar.com).

If my time comes and if I have the luxury of reflecting, I will ask only 1 question of myself: ‘Did I do my best?’ That is to say, did I eventually learn from my mistakes, and did I become the best that I could be from then on? Did I eventually learn to love God with my whole heart and mind and soul? Did I eventually learn to love others as much as I loved myself? If I did, it means I had experienced the fullness of the miracle of the color of God’s love.

Having said that, I would rather have friends than prayer warriors. What we need today are friends through thick and thin. Says Henri Nouwen:

The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing … not healing, not curing … that is a friend who cares.

Even so, if I cannot expect a miracle directly from God, I will expect a miracle indirectly from Him, from Mother Nature, which He created in the first place. From Hippocrates, we have learned that diet, fasting, use of herbs, hydrotherapy, exercise can result in natural healing. That I have hope at all, that I already consider as a little miracle. It adds color to my life.

Yolo has what it calls ‘The Color of Hope Palette’ and you can mix colors in different modes for your abode (yolocolorhouse.com). Launched just last month, June 2009, Color of Hope was ‘created by artists with nature in mind.’ The palette has shades of white (Yolo calls it Imagine), shades of grey (Nourish), shades of yellow (Aspire), shades of green (Thrive), shades of blue (Dream), and shades of red (Create). What they’re trying to tell us is this: Hope has many colors. Literally.

Truth has many colors too and, although I accept that black is a color (in printing, it is), I prefer yellow to black. Yellow reminds me of the 7 colors of the rainbow; red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. Lucky 7, you say? Luck has nothing to do with hope. Hope is a choice. Actually, the rainbow has many more colors than 7. The rainbow has the colors of hope. Give me a rainbow anytime!

Rescue by Indian women. When drought persists, consult your doctor

2009-06-30T22:31:00.000+08:00

CNN carried the frightening news of 'India's farmers cursed with severe drought' (edition.cnn.com). 'Climate Change is real,' says Dr William Dar, Director General of the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics, ICRISAT, which is based in the drylands of India and, therefore, in the thick of the climatic challenge. Dar is a Doctor of Horticulture, his postgraduate degree from the University of the Philippines (at) Los Baños, in that little University Town south of Manila. He should know what he's talking about. The drought is true, the curse is not. But it could become true if the farmers don't do what they have to do, the Indian government doesn't cooperate, and doctor scientists stay in their ivory towers. Climate Change waits for no man.

Whether in India or Zimbabwe, this time, while delayed monsoons as well as below-normal rainfall are not entirely new, there is a need for knowledge-based best efforts to mitigate the effects of the drought. When in doubt, ask the scientists. Based on information provided by Dr Dar, I can see there are two things that have to be done. One is to cope; the other is to plan and, having planned, to act accordingly.

Coping

The immediate concerns of Indian farmers have to be addressed as they come. An ICRISAT-led project is providing a working model for other similarly stressed villages not only in India but in all drylands of Africa and Asia. A group of women of Adarsha at Addakal, Mahbubnagar District in Andhra Pradesh, India, are showing how villagers can survive with the drought. The Adarsha women are helping run ICRISAT's Virtual Academy for the Semi-Arid Tropics, VASAT, which is expert- and Internet-based. The dryland farmers relay their concerns directly to the Adarsha ladies; with a little processing of the information, the ladies relay the need for knowledge or assistance to the doctors/experts of science via information & communication technology, ICT, including a satellite dish for video-conferencing when necessary or desirable. This is ICT technology truly in the service of the people in the hands of the people themselves, with a little help from their friends, the doctors of science. The women of Adarsha, may their tribe increase!

Planning and Acting

Beyond coping, Dr Dar proposes a 4-pronged science-based strategy not only to combat the drought but more so to improve the harvests from crops. I translate the strategy as follows, that farmers should:

(1) Replace crops endangered by drought.

With the delay of monsoon rains, farmers may not be able to grow their crops of choice. Instead, Dar says, 'they should grow other shorter-duration crops.' These are the ones you can harvest sooner rather than later, avoiding the drought that will come later. That is because these crops become harvestable before the soil moisture gets depleted if the growing season lasts longer.

(2) Grow drought-tolerant crops and season-adapted crops.

ICRISAT and partners from the Indian Council for Agricultural Research (ICAR) and state universities have developed and released several varieties of sorghum, pearl millet, chickpea, pigeon and groundnut that not only decrease the effects of the drought but also increase yields over those of traditional varieties. The doctors of academe are not only good in science; they are also good in technology.

(3) Practice conservation agriculture.

'Water scarcity,' Dr Dar says, 'is indeed the most critical constraint of dryland agriculture.' That is to say, anything you do that helps you to conserve water is good for your farming. Such as preventing land degradation – when you do not protect your soil from erosion, your field gets deprived of organic matter, for instance, and hence cannot store much water. Vermi-composting may be an option. Likewise, it is a must to harvest the excess water during the rainy season, for later irrigation as the need arises.

(4) Communities must learn to help themselves.

With more appropriate policies translated into more funded projects, national and local institutions, public or private, must help empower communities in support of dryland agriculture, which has been neglected long enough. There is need for low-cost credit, market linkages, more roads and bridges, more value added to farm produce, more support services than ever before. There is also need for more farming options such as crop & livestock raising models, and multiple cropping as a hedge against failure in a single crop.

Traditional agriculture has always been a gamble with the monsoons; since the weather is not what the weatherman predicts but what Mother Nature dictates, that is why agriculture may be the riskiest venture there is. That is why, Dr Dar suggests, 'India should start investing for the long-term stability and sustainability of the farming sector, particularly in dryland agriculture.' If you gamble with the monsoons, you lose. If you plan ahead and act accordingly, you win.

My Cancer Story. Let Nobel Prize winner Marquez eat graviola!

2009-05-18T08:35:00.040+08:00

What brings my email? Today, 16 May Manila time, I got a cancer notice and received cancer cure news. Should I believe the notice, or should I reject the news?

There is no cure for cancer, is there? There is only chemo, and that scares me to death. No, no chemo for me! 'The question was, which would the chemo kill first: the cancer or me?' – Lance Armstrong. 'Cancer got me over unimportant fears, like getting old' – Olivia Newton-John. I'm 69.

Cancer is what I got for opening my Yahoo mail after a week or two; Frank A Hilario doesn't live here anymore; long ago, I migrated to Gmail, 02 July 2005 to be exact, invited by my son Jomar. I'm glad the cancer isn't mine. It's that of the Nobel Prize-winning writer I tried to read long ago, and gave up trying. He is dense.

As I write this, a few minutes ago, at 1726 hours 16 May 2009, Saturday in Manila, I received an email of ´A farewell letter from a genius´ – Gabriel Garcia Marquez. By ANN (author not named), the story is that Marquez has a terminal form of cancer. The Intro says:

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, famous writer from Colombia (familiarly known as ´Gabo´ in his native country), and Nobel Prize winner for Literature in 1982, has retired from public life for reasons of health. He has a form of cancer (that) is terminal. He has sent a farewell letter to his friends and it has been circulated (via) the Internet. It is recommended reading because it is moving to see how one of the best and most brilliant of writers expresses himself & with sorrow.

Comment 1. It's amazing that the editorial emphasis is on seeing how the writer expresses himself and not what he expresses, the style rather than the substance!

Comment 2. I cannot deny that he is a Nobel laureate in Literature, but I deny that Marquez is one of the best and most brilliant of writers. Here are the first 2 sentences of the 1st chapter of his 1st book, the bestselling One Hundred Years of Solitude, 1st published in English in 1970; from HarperCollins:

Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. At that time Macondo was a village of twenty adobe houses, built on the bank of a river of clear water that ran along a bed of polished stones, which were white and enormous, like prehistoric eggs.

With that, Gabriel Garcia Marquez lulls me to sleep! Even the title is mind-numbing. Compare him with my favorite, Ernest Hemingway, a Nobel Prize winner himself. Here are the first 2 sentences of The Old Man And The Sea, published in 1952; from Barnes & Noble:

He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish. In the first forty days, a boy had been with him.

If I had insomnia, I would read Gabriel Garcia Marquez; if I wanted to stay awake all night, I would read Ernest Hemingway!

If Marquez has cancer, that is enough to keep him awake all day and all night. But does he?

In any case, before that email on Marquez' cancer, at 1606 hours 11 May 2006, Monday in Manila, an email reached my Yahoo inbox about the soursop (Annona muricata); in Portuguese, it is called graviola, in the Philippines guyabano. Also by ANN, the story is that this fruit is a ´miraculous natural cancer cell killer´ that is ´10,000 times stronger than chemotherapy´ (by Adriamycin). The soursop is native to Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands (plants.usda.gov), but thank God, we have guyabano anywhere in the Philippines, pick your island; it's abundant in Mt Banahaw (philippineherbs.com).

Now, it just happens that last year I edited a book by Samuel P Martin entitled The Healing Hands (August 2008, Los Baños, 100 pages, with color photographs). The cover was a metaphor for the healing hands of God as well as the healing hands of Mother Nature. Wouldn't you know! The book distills 10 healing lessons from the New Testament. The list of the natural healing techniques runs from Aromatherapy to Hip Bath to Oxygenated Water to Shiatsu to Vegetables to Yoga. Beer and red wine are included. What Martin´s Healing Hands book did not include is soursop in its list, but he had intended a second book that would list most tropical fruits and vegetables.

Now, is any of the above true, or are all rumors?

When he was very young, Gabriel Garcia Marquez lived in a house ´ filled with countless aunts and rumors of ghosts´ (Allen B Ruch, 2003, themodernword.com). As far as I already know, cancer is a house filled with countless cells and rumors of death. From the email I learn that Annona muricata is a house filled with sour-sweetness and rumors of health.

Where there's smoke, there's fire. Do we believe the rumors?

Let's examine the evidence at hand. Let me now quote the first few lines of Marquez's farewell letter:

A farewell letter from a genius
If God, for a second, forgot what I have become and granted me a little bit more of life, I would use it to the best of my ability.
I wouldn´t possibly say everything that is in my mind, but I would be more thoughtful of all I say … I would give merit to things not for what they are worth, but for what they mean.
I would sleep less, I would dream more, because I know that for every minute that we close our eyes, we waste 60 seconds of light. I would walk while others stop; I would awake while others sleep.

Not bad. Here are some other selected lines I would like to quote from the letter:

How mistaken they are when they think that they stop falling in love when they grow old, without knowing that they grow old when they stop falling in love.
I would give wings to children, but I would leave it to them to learn how to fly by themselves.

Beautiful!

If I knew that these are the last moments to see you, I would say 'I love you.'

Corny. Old, sentimental fool! In the rest of the letter, he only talks about loving – loving those who love him. What good is there in that? Even the charlatans love those who love them. Marquez is a Roman Catholic (nndb.com); here are the exact words from the New Testament, Matthew 5: 46 (New Revised Standard Version, NRSV, Catholic Edition): 'For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same?' The real challenge in life, even to the point of your last breath, is to love those who hate you. To win a Nobel Prize is to obtain approbation from Man; to love your enemy is to gain approbation from God. You have a choice between the devil and the deep blue yonder.

But was the letter real?

First, the rumor of terminal cancer on Marquez that the ´farewell letter from a genius´ referred to. To verify, I googled for

cancer "Gabriel Garcia Marquez"

(the double quotes for me to get the man I wanted and not a horse of a different color), and in the first webpage I clicked, I got Alex Boese ´s ´Gabriel Garcia Marquez´s Final Farewell´ (2002). Unlike ´A farewell letter from a genius,´ this one is entitled ´The Puppet´ and it´s a poem, not a letter. This is his final poem? Let me quote the first few lines (it's free verse):

The Puppet
If for a moment God would forget that I am a rag doll and give me a scrap of life, possibly I would not say everything that I think, but I would definitely think everything I say.
I would value things not for how they are worth but rather for what they mean.
I would sleep little, dream more. I know that for each minute that we close our eyes we lose sixty seconds of light.
I would walk when the others loiter; I would awaken when the others sleep.

If you compare the letter and the poem, they are very, very similar, aren't they? The poem reads better. But it cannot be both a letter and a poem, can it? Marquez would not repeat himself like that, because that is plagiarizing yourself, and for all his being boring, he is an original, not a copy.

Question: Now, which one is the rumor and which one is the truth? Answer: Neither. It´s a hoax; the poem ' La Marioneta' (The Puppet) was in fact the work of a Mexican ventriloquist (ANN, answers.com). It's obvious that the 'farewell letter' is based on The Puppet.

It´s true, says Juan Forero, writing in the New York Times (´Garcia Marquez, Fighting Cancer, Issues Memoir,´ nytimes.com). The part of the cancer, that is. In 1999, Marquez learned that he had lympathic cancer. He underwent chemotherapy in a Los Angeles hospital, cloistered himself for 3 years, and in October 2002 was reported about to come out with a 579-page book To Live To Tell It (first released in Colombia).

That book did come out, but with a slightly different title, Living To Tell The Tale (Spanish title, Vivir Para Contarla, amazon.com). This is the first of a trilogy of his memoirs. 'It is rambling and hard to follow,' according to one reviewer (ANN, 18 October 2004, amazon.com). Those Nobel Prize winners in Literature usually are difficult to read. Why can't those geniuses write in the language of the people and elevate it with their art?

Truth to tell, I never again attempted to read Gabriel Garcia Marquez, even if I did read he was a Nobel Prize winner. But the email on his cancer and his 'farewell letter' together with the email on Graviola as cancer cure were too much to resist. He wrote of his native Colombia; did he believe in the wisdom of his people?

Marquez did undergo chemo. So I'm not surprised he 'disappeared' for 3 years; that's what chemotherapy does to you – it makes you hate to look at yourself in the mirror.

Falling hair is what happens outside; what happens inside is more frightening. About that, National Cancer Institute says (quoted by MedlinePlus (nlm.nih.gov):

Normally, your cells grow and die in a controlled way. Cancer cells keep forming without control. Chemotherapy is drug therapy that can stop these cells from multiplying. However, it can also harm healthy cells, which causes side effects.

I have yet to hear of chemo without side effects. If you knew, they might shock you, as they stunned me; here is the longest list I found, from the Cleveland Clinic Cancer Center (chemocare.com):

Side Effects of Chemotherapy
A
1. Abdominal Pain
2. Acid Indigestion
3. Acid Reflux
4. Allergic Reactions
5. Alopecia
6. Anaphylasix
7. Anemia
8. Anxiety
9. Appetite (Lack Of)
10. Arthralgias
11. Asthenia
12. Ataxia
13. Azotemia
B
14. Balance & Mobility Changes
15. Bilirubin Blood Level
16. Bone Pain
17. Bladder Problems
18. Bleeding Problems
19. Blood Clots
20. Blood Pressure Changes
21. Blood Test Abnormalities
22. Breathing Problems
23. Bronchitis
24. Bruising
C
25. Cardiotoxicity
26. Cardiovascular Events
27. Cataracts
28. Central Neurotoxicity
29. Chemo Brain
30. Chest Pain
31. Chills
32. Cognitive Problems
33. Cold Symptoms
34. Confusion
35. Conjunctivitis (Pink Eye)
36. Constipation
37. Cough
38. Cramping
39. Cystitis
D
40. Deep Vein Thrombosis (DVT)
41. Dehydration
42. Depression
43. Diarrhea
44. Dizziness
45. Drug Reactions
46. Dry Eye Syndrome
47. Dry Mouth
48. Dry Skin
49. Dyspepsia
50. Dyspnea
E
51. Early Satiety
52. Edema
53. Electrocardiogram (ECG/EKG) Changes
54. Electrolyte Imbalance
55. Esophagitis
56. Eye Problems
F
57. Fatigue
58. Feeling Faint
59. Fertility
60. Fever
61. Flatulence
62. Flu-like Syndrome
63. Flushing
G
64. Gas
65. Gastric Reflux
66. Gastroesophageal Reflux Disease (GERD)
67. Genital Pain
68. Granulocytopenia
69. Gynecomastia
70. Glaucoma
H
71. Hair Loss
72. Hand-Foot Syndrome
73. Headache
74. Hearing Loss
75. Hearing Problems
76. Heart Failure
77. Heart Palpitations
78. Heart Problems
79. Heart Rhythm Changes
80. Heartburn
81. Hematoma
82. Hemorrhagic Cystitis
83. Hepatotoxicity
84. High Blood Pressure (Hypertension)
85. High Liver Enzymes
86. Hyperamylasemia (High Amylase)
87. Hypercalcemia (High Calcium)
88. Hyperchloremia (High Chloride)
89. Hyperglycemia (High Blood Sugar)
90. Hyperkalemia (High Potassium)
91. Hyperlipasemia (High Lipase)
92. Hypermagnesemia (High Magnesium)
93. Hypernatremia (High Sodium)
94. Hyperphosphatemia (High Phosphous)
95. Hyperpigmentation
96. Hypersensitivity Skin Reactions
97. Hypertriglyceridemia (High Triglycerides)
98. Hyperuricemia (High Uric Acid)
99. Hypoalbuminemia (Low Albumin)
100. Hypocalcemia (Low Calcium)
101. Hypochloremia (Low Chloride)
102. Hypoglycemia (Low Blood Sugar)
103. Hypokalemia (Low Potassium)
104. Hypomagnesemia (Low Magnesium)
105. Hyponatremia (Low Sodium)
106. Hypophosphatemia (Low Phosphous)
I
107. Impotence
108. Incoordination
109. Infection
110. Injection Site Reactions
111. Injury
112. Insomnia
113. Iron Deficiency Anemia
114. Itching
J
115. Joint Pain
K
116. Kidney Problems
L
117. Leukopenia
118. Libido (Loss Of)
119. Liver Dysfunction
120. Liver Problems
121. Loss of Libido
122. Low Blood Counts
123. Low Blood Pressure (Hypotension)
124. Low Platelet Count
125. Low Red Blood Cell Count
126. Low White Blood Cell Count
127. Lung Problems
M
128. Memory Loss
129. Menopause
130. Metallic Taste
131. Mouth Sores
132. Mucositis
133. Muscle Pain
134. Myalgias
135. Myelosuppression
136. Myocarditis
N
137. Nail Changes
138. Nausea
139. Nephrotoxicity
140. Nervousness
141. Neutropenia
142. Neutropenic Fever
143. Nosebleeds
144. Numbness
O
145. Ototoxicity
P
146. Pain
147. Palmar-Plantar Erythrodysesthesia (PPE)
148. Pancytopenia
149. Pericarditis
150. Peripheral Neuropathy
151. Pharyngitis
152. Photophobia
153. Photosensitivity
154. Pneumonia
155. Pneumonitis
156. Post-nasal Drip
157. Proteinuria
158. Pulmonary Embolus (PE)
159. Pulmonary Fibrosis
160. Pulmonary Toxicity
R
161. Radiation Recall
162. Rash
163. Rapid Heart Beat
164. Rectal Bleeding
165. Restlessness
166. Rhinitis
167. Ringing Ears
168. Runny Nose
S
169. Sadness
170. Seizures
171. Sexuality
172. Shortness of Breath
173. Sinusitis
174. Skin Reactions
175. Sleep Problems
176. Sore Mouth
177. Stomach Sour
178. Stomach Upset
179. Stomatitis
180. Swelling
T
181. Taste Changes
182. Thrombocytopenia
183. Thyroid Hormone Levels
184. Tingling
185. Tinnitus
186. Trouble Sleeping
U
187. Urinary Tract Infection
V
188. Vaginal Bleeding
189. Vaginal Dryness
190. Vaginal Infection
191. Vertigo
192. Vomiting
W
193. Water Retention
194. Watery Eyes
195. Weakness
196. Weight Changes
197. Weight Gain
198. Weight Loss
X
199. Xerostomia

With such an extended list of side effects, Sadness included, I would say that the cure is worse than the disease!

That's not my list, folks; it's from the Cleveland Clinic Cancer Center, so you better believe it. Just looking at all the 199 makes me cry. Of course, not all these apply in any single case, but just the same, if you ask me, 1 side effect is already 1 too many for me.

I believe in divine healing, that's why I consented to edit The Healing Hands book of Martin, as I mentioned earlier. In case of failure to invoke God's mercy, I believe in resorting to natural healing, short of a miracle. So, if I had cancer, I would try taking as my medicine Annona muricata. The email claim is that this fruit is 10,000 times more effective than chemotherapy. But that I must say is not correct. You cannot compare cure with treatment.

Chemo therapy means chemical treatment, which is different from cure. (1) If you have athlete's foot, you apply an antifungal spray, and that kills the fungus that causes the disease. Your foot smells nice again. That's cure. (2) If you have diabetes and your pancreas does not produce enough insulin, the doctor injects you with insulin to help you live a 'high-quality life' as much as possible. That's treatment. The injection doesn't remove the cause of why your pancreas is not producing enough insulin for you.

Strictly speaking, chemotherapy does not cure cancer; it destroys the cancer cells (cancerhelp.org.uk); that's what it's supposed to do. The best the cancer specialist can offer you? A promise that after chemo, you may be able to lead 'a high-quality life,' you know what I mean. Not normal.

And the best the graviola can offer you? Soursop will not only destroy your cancer cells but more importantly, guyabano will help your body destroy the cause of your cancer – because it will help your body build up its immune system. Your body will work its own miracle.

Not only that, guyabano makes a nutritious snack, graviola a delicious drink. So, give me Annona muricata anytime!

Power in numbers. Science with human faces

2009-04-05T22:57:00.000+08:00

In art, movies are numbers and faces. In science, generations are also numbers and faces. You can choose which to show. I choose both.

Shelter is a movie now shooting by Nala Films of Los Angeles in California, with a budget of $22 M, and yes, they want that ‘Inbred Look’ (David M Brown, 26 February 2008, pittsburghlive.com). Because it’s a supernatural horror thriller, and yes, it’s a story about real people in the mountains who have been inbreeding generations after generations, Nala Films is looking for people with a different kind of look, such as an albino girl and deformed people to depict those West Virginia mountain folk. (In case you’re interested, the movie stars Julianne Moore, winner of Emmy and Golden Globe awards, star of the film Body of Evidence.) With people, inbred is weird. I’ll call that the Shelter Effect. Given generations, among people the Shelter Effect produces not only decadence but a social monstrosity. In the movies, visuals with inhuman faces may produce a box office hit, like Dr Frankenstein's monster – but we’re not in the movies, are we?

With luck, terror in movies makes waves; with luck, error in science makes you waver, and then you go on with a new idea and a new resolve. The Inbred Look is the ultimate dream of Nala Films; they think the ones that look worst will look best to moviegoers. It’s been done before. Quite the opposite, the Hybrid Crop is the ultimate dream of breeders; they know heterosis or hybrid vigor will bring out excellent offspring, plant or animal. With continued inbreeding, with related parents, you get badder and badder offspring, as the Nala movie would show; with continued crossbreeding or hybridization, with unrelated parents, you get better and better progeny. In history, why do royal bloodlines run out? It’s due to inbreeding, or inter-family marriages; they want the family blood to remain pure, and that’s exactly why it runs into family trouble.

Inbreeding is the mating together of blood-related animals or gene-related plants. In people, that would be mother & son, father & daughter, sibling & sibling, half-sibling & half-sibling, cousin & cousin, aunt & nephew, niece & uncle and grandparent & grandchild (Sarah Hartwell, 2008, messybeast.com). Because of the limited gene pool from continuous inbreeding, the deleterious genes become widespread and the breed loses vigor. Denis J Murphy says that that is known as ‘inbreeding depression’ marked by poor performance such as lower growth rate or lower disease resistance (books.google.com.ph), or higher death rate. The Shelter Effect. Not unlike a car runs out of gas, a breed runs out of vigor; to make the same car run again, you buy gas; to make the breed thrive again, you cross it with another, and then you get a new and better breed. There’s power in driving a car; there’s more power in breeding. Nice work if you can get it!

You do have to be careful. And so a ‘Kissing Cousins’ marriage, or that between cousins, as well as any other marriage between close relatives, is against the law; it’s inbreeding, and as seen in cattle, all consequences of inbreeding are undesirable (ext.vt.edu). It’s obeying the laws of love that makes the world go ‘round, along with obeying the laws of genetics.

And, while in theory you can, in fact, no, you can’t get rid of inbreeding, or shouldn’t. You need lines resulting from inbreeding for crossbreeding – that is, in crops, whether plant or animal. You just have to watch out for the Shelter Effect.

Is cloning inbreeding? Like stem cutting in plants, cloning is asexual, that is, no sex is involved; cloning is multiplying the exact same genetic materials. It is not inbreeding, but the results are the same: a multiplication of the same substance, not unlike Jesus’ multiplication of the 5 loaves of bread to feed 5,000 hungry mouths in the New Testament (Mark 6: 41-44). I don’t know about cloning, but a miracle is nice if you can get it!

In inbreeding, there is the production of sameness; in crossbreeding, there is the production of unlikeness. In inbreeding, if you keep planting the seeds of your previous crop over the years, there is a danger that all the recessive traits will crop up (if you will pardon the pun). There is a loss of hardiness and vitality; it is not surprising that rare genetic diseases become more common among inbred crop populations (naturalstandard.com).

From cuttings of an old plant, you get new plants along with the old genes; from seeds of self-pollinated crops, you get the same. From crosses of parent plants from different lines, you get new plants plus new gene combinations that result in character traits that are usually desirable, like much higher yield along with much lower fertilizer cost. Inbreeding perpetuates its own kind; crossbreeding perpetuates hybrid vigor.

Hybrids give you hybrid vigor, the ultimate dream of breeders, plant or animal. If plants, they give you quantum leaps of yield so high that you will jump for joy; if animals, they give you quantum leaps of meat, milk or eggs so much you will jump through hoops.

Another way of saying that is this: Hybrid vigor gives you higher returns on your crop investment, all things being equal. With the same inputs, the higher the output, the higher the net.

That’s science, that’s knowledge. Now, today knowledge has a way of multiplying itself either by printed word or mouth or electronic file. And knowledge, known by publicly funded institutes of science, like ICRISAT, International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics, is similarly known by private seed companies. Is that good or bad? It can be better.

In India in the 1990s, even as scientists of ICRISAT were aware of hybrid vigor, scientists of private companies in India themselves were aware of it and, thinking business, started developing their own science around their own new and improved crops (CLL Gowda et al, 2004, cropscience.org.au). Since the private companies were closer to the seed pushers (merchants) and users (farmers), this led to the decline of funding in ICRISAT and other research centers of the CGIAR, Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research, which forced significant budget cuts all over CGIAR (icrisat.org). Business was minding its own business, not thinking out of the box. Error. Science was making a similar mistake. 2 wrongs don’t make a right.

You can’t do much science without much funding and without much enthusiasm. In those years, ICRISAT urgently needed new ideas and a new resolve.

In 2000, with William Dar as the young and new Director General of ICRISAT, the Institute woke up from its stupor and, thinking out of the box, among other things saw that the private companies could be enticed to become allies in funding if first they became partners in research. Collaborators all, in a consortium. Thus were born the hybrid parents research consortia for sorghum and pearl millet that year at ICRISAT. At that time, the consortium model was a novel idea within the CGIAR system. This was the first broad-based public-private partnership in the history of that system. If you can’t fight them, join them. This is science with many human faces reflecting work in harmony with one another.

Other CGIAR centers have since been adopting the ICRISAT consortium model in their R&D operations. They know a good thing when they see one.

Here is a list of specific ICRISAT consortia. There is the Desert Margins Program, a 9-country consortium fighting desertification in Africa, funded by the Global Environment Facility (2003, icrisat.org). There is a Sweet Sorghum Ethanol Research Consortium, with Tata Chemicals and Praj Industries of

India

as 2 of the newest members (2007, icrisat.org). There is the Pearl Millet Hybrid Parents Research Consortium that has 35 members (icrisat.org). There is the Chickpea Genomics Consortium on Drought Tolerance (2007, icrisat.org). There is the Africa Biofortified Sorghum Project, a consortium of 7 African and 2 American institutions funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (2007, icrisat.org). One of the latest is the consortium for the project of the Government of India called ‘Sweet Sorghum Ethanol Value Chain Development’ with 7 partners (2008, icrisat.org).

Outside of the CGIAR system, MS Swaminathan, former Director General of IRRI and now Chair of India’s National Commission on Farmers, has recommended an ICRISAT-model consortium approach in watershed management for dryland districts throughout his country (2006, icrisat.org). A local innovation with a global application.

They all have seen the power in the consortium:

(1) There’s power in numbers. It’s called synergy.
(2) You have a knowledge base of resource persons working together.
(3) It’s a one-stop shop for clients, not to mention members.
(4) There are education & training opportunities.
(5) You enjoy economies of scale.
(6) There’s access to resources otherwise unavailable.
(7) You participate in a focused project with a clear-cut objective – by itself, a definite benefit.

It works of course if you have teamwork, and that requires a Team Captain.

I’m coming to that. Another novel idea was put into practice by Dar early in his first term as Director General; he launched Team ICRISAT as a movement within the Institute in early 2002. With Dar as Team Captain, this resulted in ‘staff morale greatly boosted’ (icrisat.org). That was the first thing that the Team spirit made happen; I’m sure it did much more than that. What subsequently happened at ICRISAT proves to me that if you have a great Team Captain, you will have a great Team.

One time, in a lull during a seminar in the

Philippines

, I asked Dar what gave him the idea of Team ICRISAT, and he said he had borrowed the concept from sports, from Team Philippines (basketball). Today, when I think of Team ICRISAT, I think basketball and I think consortium, that is, public institutions and private companies working towards producing new and improved crops collaborating as a team with a common goal (if you will pardon the pun). Team Chickpea, Team Groundnut, Team Pearl Millet, Team Pigeon Pea, Team Sorghum – each should make a great Team to produce scores of new and improved crops.

You can’t have new crops without hybrid parents, and you can’t have hybrid parents without HPR, hybrid parents research. In 2000, for pearl millet, the consortium for HPR emerged as ‘the most appropriate among partnership models’ (RP Mula et al, December 2007, SAT eJournal, icrisat.org). Team ICRISAT discovered the power in public-private collaboration in science.

The HPR consortium was to follow 2 guidelines: (1) It shall address the core research agenda of ICRISAT. (2) All products of HPR shall remain in the public domain as IPGs, international public goods.

As of 2001, the ICRISAT hybrid pigeon pea, the world’s first hybrid of any food legume crops, had been developed through partnership in HPR (icrisat.org). Out of this, a hybrid cultivar called Pushkal was launched in July 2008, that is, made available commercially (icrisat.org). (I myself have written about this; click if you want to read: ‘Serving ICRISAT Science’ and ‘The Beans Revolution, 1’ icrisatwatch.blogspot.com).

The consortium model broadened the concept of public-private sector partnership, and gave birth to the Agri-Science Park of ICRISAT, which is the hub of the wheel of public-private partnerships for the development and commercialization of technologies such as hybrid seeds of pearl millet and sweet sorghum. The consortium tactic has emerged as a successful method of generating funds as well as promoting development and marketing of technologies for the poor in the semi-arid tropics of Africa and Asia. This is the dream of those interested in technology transferred to the people.

Not resting on its laurels, ICRISAT’s search for partnerships is ‘proactive’ (Belum VS Reddy et al 2005, icrisat.org/journal). Seek and you shall find. The partnership involves joint identification of priorities and joint investments for research in key areas. As of the latest data made available by ICRISAT, there are now 50 private seed company partners with financial contributions under 5-year renewable agreements. Here is the list of those consortia members:

(1) Adriana Seed Company (Brazil)
(2) Advanta India
(3) Ajeet Seeds
(4) Ankur Seeds
(5) Avesthagen Technologies
(6) Basant Agro Tech
(7) Bayer BioSciences
(8) Bharati Seeds
(9) Biogene Agritech
(10) Bioseed Research India
(11) Biostadt MHSeeds
(12) DevGen Seeds and Crop Tech
(13) Energy Seed Intl
(14) Ganga Kaveri Seeds
(15) Green Life Seed & Bioculture
(16) Gujarat Hybrid Seeds
(17) JK Agri Genetics
(18) Kanchan Ganga Seed Co
(19) Kaveri Seed Co
(20) Krishidhan Seeds
(21) Krishna Seeds
(22) Maharashtra State Seeds Corporation
(23) Mahodaya Hybrid Seeds
(24) MAHYCO
(25) Metahelix Life Sciences
(26) NAFED
(27) Nandi Seeds
(28) Nath Biogene
(29) Navbharat Seeds
(30) Nimbkar Agricultural Research Institute
(31) Nimbkar Seeds
(32) Nitya Seed Sciences
(33) Nodai Seeds
(34) Nuziveedu Seeds
(35) Pacific Seeds (Australia)
(36) Pioneer Overseas Corporation
(37) Pradham Biotech
(38) Pravardhan Seeds
(39) Rasi Seeds
(40) Shakti Vardhak Hybrid Seeds
(41) SM Sehgal Foundation
(42) Southern Petrochemical Industries
(43) Spriha BioSciences
(44) Swarna Seeds
(45) Syngenta India
(46) Tulasi Seeds
(47) Vibha Agrotech
(48) Vikky’s Agrisciences
(49) VNR Seeds
(50) Zuari Seeds

As a result, ICRISAT is now a center of excellence for research and development for hybrid parents in 3 crops – sorghum, pearl millet, pigeon pea; it is now a supplier of high-quality parents necessary for hybrid development, testing and release in Asia (icrisat.org). These are what I like to call parents-in-waiting.

So now you have a good idea why ICRISAT has been into HPR, hybrid parents research. It’s within the wide area of crop improvement. To have an idea how Team ICRISAT does it, let us look at its efforts in breeding & selection for sorghum seed parents for the last 31 years, in 3 phases:

1st phase 1978-1988 – emphasis on crop grain yield and food quality matching local crop seasons and sites
2nd phase 1989-1998 – emphasis on crop resistance to pests, diseases and drought
3rd phase 1999-today – emphasis on farmer-preferred grain characteristics such as white, large and lustrous grains from cultivars that are adapted to post-rainy season growing conditions.

The phasing indicates that in solo or partnership research, you start with the problems of local farmers and end up with the choices of local farmers. Which gives me an idea; to generate an entirely different marketing theory, we can look at it as a demand-supply chain, not simply a supply chain. In ICRISAT’s actual sorghum work, the first 2 phases are supply push; the 3rd and final phase is demand pull. In marketing as in science, the pull is greater than the push. (As in: Gravitation is greater than 1 billion physicists praising Isaac Newton.) That is to say, in the production and marketing of crop-related knowledge, or technology, the farmers are always right because they are always the customers.

As a direct product of the ICRISAT consortia, many partner local private seed companies in India have now grown into global businesses. In turn, the partnership has enabled ICRISAT to develop breeding lines and hybrid parents, as well as enabled country NARS, national agricultural research systems, in Africa and Asia to diversify the genetic base of their local hybrid programs. That means better genetic materials for better crops. The more diverse the parents-in-waiting, the greater the hybrid vigor of the offspring.

Meanwhile, the challenges remain and there are 2 of them: inside the consortium, that is, value-adding relationships with partners, and outside the consortium, challenges arising from changing farming systems, changing farmer preferences, as well as changing consumer preferences (icrisat.org).

Now, let me remind you, you can’t have hybrids without inbreds. Hybrids and inbreds co-exist. Thus, when a hurricane destroyed the maize seeds stored by farmers and the national seed bank in Honduras, CIMMYT, Centro Internacional de Mejoramiento de Maiz y Trigo, sent to Honduras half a ton of maize seeds of both hybrids and inbreds that had high yields, were highly adapted to the country, tolerant to stress such as that brought about by drought or pest (icrisat.org). CIMMYT and ICRISAT both belong to the CGIAR system.

Currently, with respect to Africa and ICRISAT-derived inbred-line cultivars, ICRISAT cultivar Macia is being grown in 30% of the area planted to sorghum in Eritrea, Kenya, Mozambique, Namibia, Tanzania and

Zimbabwe

(icrisat.org). Cultivar Gadam el Hamam is being adopted by farmers in Kenya, and Pato is being adopted by farmers in Tanzania. Phofu, which adapts to late-season drought due to early maturity and stays green, has been adopted by 21% of farmers in Botswana. Cultivar S35, also called ICVS 111, enjoys 10 to 15% adoption in Nigeria and Ghana, and ICVS 400 is popular in Nigeria. The extra-early cultivar CSM 63 is accepted by farmers in West and Central Africa. 7 new lines in the Guinea race of sorghum have been released by ICRISAT in Mali. This race is grown by many, including farmers in other countries in West Africa. Today, half of India’s 8.5 M ha planted to sorghum is growing hybrids. Of the 50 commercial hybrids in the market, about 30 are from ICRISAT parents or lines. Nearly 50% of

India

’s 10 M ha planted to pearl millet is growing at least 84 hybrids, at least 60 of these based on ICRISAT parents or lines.

All those are products of the consortium model.

ICRISAT has been promoting the consortium model in places other than in India. In Asia, for one, ICRISAT has signed agreements with 5 private companies in the Philippines to form a sweet sorghum consortium for ethanol production. In Africa, ICRISAT has been exploring the formation of consortia in Uganda, Nigeria, Mozambique and South Africa.

The Institute recently launched a consortium for self-pollinated chickpea and groundnut to share new breeding lines and varieties with partners, eventually so that farmers can have access to the seeds of improved cultivars for higher yields and incomes. Yields they can appreciate, incomes they can enjoy.

‘Power is the capacity to bring about change,’ they say; ‘as measured by results,’ I say. Now then, if I may summarize the power in consortia, it’s simply this: It’s not ‘I alone can’ but rather, ‘Together, we can.’ (That's FVR, Fidel Valdez Ramos, remember? 'Kaya natin 'to!') Theory must translate into practice. Easy to say, hard to do, which makes the ICRISAT consortium breakthrough story all the more remarkable.

And so the story of the power in the ICRISAT consortia continues. I want to point out that while it did not invent the concept, ICRISAT has marvelously tapped the power in consortia to create science with human faces.

My Fellow Filipinos!

2009-03-11T09:26:00.000+08:00

FrancisM as a National Artist

As I see it, in one word, Francism is FrancisM’s everlasting legacy to his fellow Filipinos. A Francism is a word, a thought, description, an exhortation, a song, rap music, video movie, clothing design, phone call, move to reconcile, that speak not simply of love of country – already, there are many patriots, such as we have – but more so, love of fellowmen – sadly, the patriots we have hate each other.

FrancisM and Francisms burst into the Philippine musical scene with a landmark rap musical piece, ‘Mga Kababayan Ko,’ in his smash debut 1990 album Yo! (gmanews.tv) that also spawned the ballad hit ‘Cold Summer Nights’ (Gerry Plaza, 06 March, newsinfo.inquirer.net). Under OctoArts, Yo! ‘marked the birth of nationalistic rap’ in the Philippines (filipinomusica.com). ‘Mga Kababayan Ko’ is Francism in all senses that FrancisM wanted to convey to his countrymen. To appreciate it in full, I have reproduced the Tagalog original along with my own English translation that is appearing for the first time (below).

Francisms are in fact simple truths, or simple instructions, nothing fancy:

* Be proud of your color, you are a Filipino!
* Think that you have the power / To reach what you desire.

* We should get up and go / so we don’t stay poor and low.
* Do your work well.
* You can if you want.
* If you can, he can.
* All together, we can!

* What we have is fine / Think of that all the time.
* A good life will come if you stand firm / In pain and fatigue amid problems.
* Don’t drown.
* Go up, don’t go down.
* Envy you should avoid.
* Don’t covet what others have. / Instead, be glad about / What your brother has achieved.
* We should all work hand-in-hand.

* Let us respect our mother / She is the light of the home.
* Let us honor our father / And follow his wisdom.
* To the siblings: Love one another.
* It’s only right to talk together / About a misunderstanding.

* Don’t run away from a weakness.
* Marriage is a must.
* Don’t pretend to be clean.
* Reconcile enemies. / Stand between, don’t patronize.

* We are all brothers and sisters.
* Let us rectify every error we make.
* Let us pray to God, our Creator.
* Let us be saints and not satans.

Note on my translation: Since Pinoy rap can’t be transformed without much loss in the translation, I have translated freely, even as I tried to rhyme. As the original has no measure, my translation doesn’t have either. ‘My Countrymen’ is a literal translation of ‘Mga Kababayan Ko’ while my own ‘My Fellow Filipinos’ emphasizes both the fellowship and being Filipinos.

Mga Kababayan Ko FrancisM, 1990	*My Fellow Filipinos* 2009, Frank A Hilario
Chorus Mga kababayan ko Dapat lang malaman n’yo Bilib ako sa kulay ko Ako ay Pilipino! Kung may itim or may puti Mayron naman kayumanggi. Isipin mo na kaya mong Abutin ang ‘yung minimithi.	Chorus My fellow Filipinos You all should know I’m proud of my color I am a Filipino! If there is Black or White There is the Brown race. Think that you have the power To reach what you desire.
Dapat magsumikap Para tayo’y di maghirap. Ang trabaho mo pagbutihin mo. Dahil pag gusto mo ay kaya mo Kung kaya mo ay kaya n’ya At kaya nating dalawa!	We should get up and go So we don’t stay poor and low. Do your work well. You can if you want If you can, he can All together we can!
Magaling ang atin Yan ang laging iisipin. Pag-asenso mararating Kung handa kang tiisin Ang hirap at pagod sa problema. ‘Wag kang malunod Umaahon ka, wag lumubog Pagka’t ginhawa naman ang susunod. Iwasan mo ang inggit Ang sa iba’y ibig mong makamit Dapat nga ikaw matuwa Sa napala ng iyong kapatid. Ibig kung ipabatid Na lahat tayo’y kabig-bisig.	What we have is fine Think of that all the time. A good life will come If you stand firm In pain & fatigue amid problems. Don’t drown Go up, don’t go down A life of comfort will come. Envy you should avoid Don’t covet what others have Instead, be glad about What your brother has achieved. I want you to understand We should all work hand-in-hand.
Repeat Chorus	Repeat Chorus
Respetuhin natin ang ating ina Ilaw siya ng tahanan Bigyang galang ang ama At ang payo ang susundan. At sa magkakapatid Kailangan ay magmahalan Dapat lang ay pag-usapan Ang hindi nauunawaan.	Let us respect our mother She is the light of the home Let us honor our father And follow his wisdom. And to the siblings Love one another It’s only right to talk together About a misunderstanding.
Wag takasan ang pagkukulang Kasalan ay panagutan. Magmalinis ay iwasan Nakakainis, marumi naman. Ang magkaaway ipagbati Gumitna ka at ‘wag kumampi	Don’t run away from weakness Marriage is a must. Don’t pretend to be clean You irritate, you’re unclean. Reconcile any enemies Stand between, don’t patronize.
Lahat tayo’y magkakapatid Anong mang mali ay ituwid. Magdasal sa Diyos Maykapal Maging banal at ‘wag hangal. Itong tula ay alay ko Sa inyo at sa buong mundo.	All brothers & sisters we are Let us rectify our error. Let us pray to God our Creator Let us be saints and not satans. I dedicate this verse To you and the whole universe.
Repeat Chorus	Repeat Chorus

So you see, Francisms are simple truths spoken in verses and rhymes delivered in style, in a singsong manner, with a lively beat backed by regular, rhythmic sounds from a disc jockey. Francisms are hip-hop, aka rap music, which since 1990 have been coming from the mouth and mind of FrancisM. Until last Friday, as he is no more. Kiko, The Man from Manila, Master Rapper, the Mouth, King of Pinoy Rap, Urban Patriot, a Free Mind, names he liked to call himself, is gone.

07 March. ‘The Eraserheads salute Francis M at reunion concert’ (Bong Godinez, pep.ph). It was at the SM Mall of Asia Concert Grounds. The holding of that concert itself was a tribute, as the Eraserheads had broken up 7 years ago and FrancisM had persisted that they get back together again. The group dedicated the whole concert in his memory. FrancisM was supposed to be their guest and do ‘SuperProxy,’ one of their songs. The concert was produced by MTV Philippines. FrancisM was MTV Asia’s first Filipino VJ, video jockey, along with Regine Tolentino and Donita Rose (Wikipedia).

10 March. It’s not easy not to cry reading more and more about the young, popular Filipino artist felled by acute myelogenous leukemia Friday, 06 March at The Medical City, a private hospital along Ortigas Avenue in Pasig City near Manila. He was 44, born 04 October 1964. I’ve been trying to, since I heard the news a few minutes after Vic Sotto announced it on noontime TV show Eat Bulaga! at GMA 7, where FrancisM had been co-host for 10 years, freelance. No, I was neither friend nor acquaintance, but the more I read the more I see that the death of Francis Michael Durango Magalona at 44 was not only unexpected but was also a loss with a national impact many times over.

He started as a break dancer, going on to become an actor (early 80s, Viva Films’ ‘Bagets 2’), radio disc jockey (late 80s), VJ for MTV Asia, video producer, video music director, rapper, singer, composer, photographer, designer, TV co-host (Plaza as cited). He was ‘the first Filipino rapper to successfully cross over to the mainstream music scene’ (Tess Bedico & Jester Manalastas, journal.com.ph), meaning that he not only succeeded with his rap music but also with his pop music – he inspired them with his patriotism, he entertained them with his songs. He was also a painter (Boy Villasanta, quoting Joey De Leon, ‘Friends remember Francis M,’ abs-cbnnews.com). He could play the harmonica; he could also produce melodies with the megaphone or microphone (filipinomusica.com). He was also a blogger; visit his ‘a Free Mind’ (francismagalona.multiply.com).

Yo! was his 1st album, released in 1990. Rap is FrancisM was his 2nd, released in 1992 – this is considered ‘one of the greatest Pinoy Rap albums’ around; with ‘Mga Praning’ (Paranoids), ‘Halalan’ (Elections), and ‘Tayo’y Mga Pinoy’ (We Are Pinoys), the album became the standard by which other raps were compared (filipinomusica.com). 1993, his 3rd album, Meron Akong Ano! (Something I Have!) 1995, his 4th, Freeman. 1996, Happy Battle. 1998, The Oddventures Of Mr Cool. 1999, Interscholastic. 2001, Freeman 2. 2002, The Best Of FrancisM. 2007, F Word. He collaborated with other music makers like Joey Ayala, Heber Bartolome, Ryan Cayabyab, Mike Hanopol, Andrew E, Michael V, Denmark and Eraserheads. He played with Pikaso, Gloc 9, Stick Figgas and Parokya ni Edgar.

Songs by FrancisM (filipinomusica.com): ‘A Pen And Ink,’ ‘Bahala Na’ (Let God), ‘Funky Monkey,’ ‘Girl Be Mine,’ Kabataan Para Sa Kinabukasan’ (Youth For Tomorrow), ‘Kaleidoscope World,’ ‘Pektus,’ (Effects), ‘Pikon’ (Onion-Skinned), ‘Puso Ng Siga’ (Heart Of A Toughie), ‘3 Stars And A Sun.’

His contributions were recognized abroad and featured in international publications such as All Music Guide To Hip-Hop: The Definitive Guide To Rap And Hip-Hop by Backbeat Books in 2003 and the magazine The Source in 2004. He was chosen by Fremantle Media, owner of American Idol, to be one of the judges of Philippine Idol, along with Ryan Cayabyab and Pilita Corales (filipinomusica.com).

FrancisM, as he liked to call himself (not Francis M as almost everyone refers to him, missing his subtlety), had his own video production company, Filipino Pictures Inc, and record company, Red Egg Records, and the clothing line FMCC, FrancisM Clothing Co, which carries the ‘3 Stars and a Sun’ line of stores (Patricia, ‘Francis Magalona: Filipino Rap Star,’ celebrity.rightpundits.com). He was the designer for FMCC. He made music videos for several bands and solo artists. His Sponge Cola’s ‘KLSP’ won Best Rock Video at the 2006 MYX Video Awards (Wikipedia).

He received many awards, among them: ‘Pioneer Hall of Fame Award’ at the 1st Annual Philippine Hip-Hop Music Awards (2005), ‘Generations Award’ at the MTV Pilipinas Video Music Awards ‘in recognition of his career that has spanned decades and broken boundaries, and for his music which continues to inspire generations of artists and music fans both here and abroad’ (quoted by Ma Rosanna Mina, abs-cbnnews.com). He was the honoree of the 1st Fil-Am Visionary Awards (Legend in Music) by the NuVision Worldwide Media.

He was one of 9 children of movie stars Pancho Magalona and Tita Duran (Durango), both idolized by the moviegoers; I did too, along with Rogelio dela Rosa and Carmen Rosales. They were popular, but not legends, or not in the stature of FrancisM, who made himself a legend in his own time.

PEP describes ‘Mga Kababayan Ko’ as ‘anthemic’ and states that it ‘clearly illustrated Kiko’s unique style of incorporating various music genres to make it sound Filipino’ (Philippine Entertainment Portal, cited in ‘Eat Bulaga! to pay tribute to Francis M Saturday,’ gmanews.tv):

The band explosion of the '90s failed to deter Kiko's growth as an artist. Recognizing fully well the need to reinvent himself and his art, Francis embraced rock music and incorporated it into his own style, producing songs such as ‘Bahay Yugyugan’ (House of Rock), ‘Meron Akong Ano,’ ‘Girl Be Mine,’ and the psychedelic ear candy, ‘Kaleidoscope World.’

He became a band man and directed bands and artists, including Sponge Cola, Join Da Club, Gloc 9, Shamrock, Picaso and Death Threat (PEP as cited).

Senator Bong Revilla Jr hailed FrancisM as ‘Pinoy Pride’ (quoted by Mark D Merueñas, 06 March, gmanews.tv). ‘The country has lost a modern-day artist, a nationalist in his own creative way. FrancisM used music and fashion to promote love of country among Filipino youth,’ the Senator said.

Bayan Secretary-General Renato M Reyes Jr said of FrancisM (‘Bayan leader pays tribute to Francis M,’ abs-cbnnews.com):

Kiko was a pioneer, a trailblazer for all the Pinoy rappers today. He started out when folks in the Philippines had not even heard of hip-hop. He was a giant in his field, yet never forgot to look after the ‘little people,’ the aspiring artists he took under his wing, or the young rappers he inspired. The Master Rapper lived up to the words of the late Lino Brocka, that the artist is also a citizen.

‘The young rappers he inspired’ – I did see and hear Michael V say on TV the day FrancisM died, ‘A big part of Michael V is FrancisM.’ And FrancisM said of him, ‘Michael V, he’s my best friend’ (quoted by Alula Love M Dela Cruz, 2007, igma.tv).

FrancisM left behind his wife Pia Maria Arroyo and his 8 children: Unna, Nicolo (adopted by FrancisM, from Pia's previous marriage), Maxene, Francis Jr, Saab, Elmo, Arkin and Clara.

Press Secretary Cerge Remonde said 09 March, that FrancisM was set to receive a posthumous Presidential Medal of Merit, saying ‘the medal recognizes the nationalism and love of country that is there in all his performances’ (quoted by abs-cbnnews.com). Some of the hit songs mentioned were ‘Mga Kababayan Ko,’ ‘Man from Manila,’ ‘Ito Ang Gusto Ko’ (This Is What I Want), ‘Three Stars and a Sun,’ and ‘Kaleidoscope World.’

When I’m writing, I don’t want to read the blogs of others, because I don’t want to be influenced by their opinions, but I’ll make an exception with Prime and his post ‘Thank you for the music’ (dleftclick.wordpress.com). His is a rich source of material, not to mention inspirational (never mind the grammar), and I quote (with my editing):

FrancisM once wrote on his blog that, ‘I guess if we just loved our country so much we would be willing to die for it. I would. But a dead me is a useless me. I am more useful alive …’ I beg to disagree though. I believe that any dead person who lived a life relevant to society serves as an inspiration for everyone to be just like him. And the Master Rapper is one of those.

And he is one of those who never succumbed to the artificial war of hiphop and metal. I know a lot of the teenagers of that time know what I’m talking about. (From within), the Man from Manila dared to unite the music of the two factions. He set up the Psychedelic Posse for the hip-hop kids and the Kannabiz Band ... for the children of metal. His wife Pia’s Evil Step-Sisters, then, added the soul flavor to his music.

It was with his daring and no non-sense attitude that FrancisM gained the respect of Filipino musicians from Masta Plann to The Dawn, from APO ... to Joey de Leon. No wonder that, time and again, he was being invited by a lot of artists to be a guest on their albums and shows. The Eraserheads’ song Super Proxy was one of the most famous of these.

Prime tells us that when the Eraserheads broke up in 2002, FrancisM refused to take sides and continued to collaborate with each of the members individually. After Ely Buendia had a heart attack in 2007, Francis M called for the Eraserheads to come together once more. He believed that the Eraserheads was ‘the most significant OPM band of Pinoy Rock.’

19 years ago, he rapped: ‘All brothers & sisters we are / Let us rectify our error.’ FrancisM. I say he was the most significant one-man band of Pinoy Rap.

He cared. With Ely Buendia, he started the Heartist Foundation, to help Filipino artists with health issues and commercial concerns (Ma Rosanna Mina, abs-cbnnews.com). For the purpose, he had been recording with Buendia and other artists for ‘The Sickos Project.’

FrancisM was ‘the artist that everyone loved,’ says Scared of Revolving Doors (atejada.wordpress.com). If for nothing else, you can’t help but love someone who had struggled with substance abuse; after attending Narcotics Anonymous, he had quit smoking and drinking. He had been sober since 2001 (ANN, manilatimes.net).

He was ‘a passionate father’ (‘Father knows best,’ Alula Love M Dela Cruz, 2008, igma.tv). ‘I maintain a friendship and mutual respect for my children,’ he said, including his adopted Unna and Nicolo. They had maintained close ties with each other, always in touch either through the cell phone or the computer (chat). ‘The closest thing God would be to man would be a parent to his children. Because that is what God has for us – unconditional love.’

Unconditional love? Our usual and immediate response to that is, ‘On one condition ...’ Variations of a theme:

‘I can forgive, but I cannot forget.’
‘I will forgive, but I also will demand justice.’
‘There are 3 dimensions of reconciliation: truth, justice, forgiveness.’
‘How can you love the unlovable?!’

Unconditional love is impossible for many of us, especially those who cry for truth and justice. We equate the life and lyrics of Francis Michael Durango Magalona with a cry for change in high places, but not unconditional love. FrancisM would have been extremely disappointed.

I believe FrancisM deserves a Philippine National Artist Award more than anyone today. Unlike many a nationalist noisy in mouth or in media, FrancisM lived his lines; he acted his art; he worked out what he wrote about. He loved his country; he loved his countrymen; he loved his family – none more than any other. He paid his dues. While the righteous would advocate a running battle, he would counsel reconciliation. While many Filipino politicians are worth their worth in fool’s gold, FrancisM was worth his weight in solid gold.

FrancisM’s body was cremated at dawn today, Wednesday, 11 March in Manila. ‘Papa, I love you,’ said Maxene, his celebrity daughter. ‘I thank you for everything. I thank you for taking care of me and my brothers and sisters, taking care of my mom’ (abs-cbnnews.com).

Senator Loren Legarda says ‘Francis M will live on thru his music’ (07 March, senate.gov.ph). I say FrancisM will live on through his example.

Photo from FrancisM's blog, francismagalona.multiply.com

The Beans Revolution, 1

2009-01-26T12:13:00.000+08:00

Jack & The New Hen That Lays Golden Eggs

Yes, this is the story of another hen that lays golden eggs. Call me Old Jack and this is full of new beans talk – from the unknown to the revolutionary Pushkal – Sanskrit word for full, abundant, many or much. I’ve never been a bean counter myself, but there’s always a first time.

It’s the legume called the pigeon pea, and this story is from problem to promise, from peas to pesos. Under the hands of science wizards, this pea has been transformed into a modern-day horn of plenty, if I may mix my metaphor. This is good news first for the farmers of India who grow pigeon pea in 3.5 million hectares (cgiar.org), which is almost the total size of 4 million hectares planted to rice in the Philippines (irri.org). Size matters; size is relative.

The pigeon pea (or pigeonpea) is a crop of a rainbow of colors. It is hardy and widely adaptable, growing well in cold or hot climates, acidic or alkaline sites, dry or irrigated fields, fertile or infertile soils (Frances Michaels, greenharvest.com.au); it is planted in many parts of Africa, Asia and Latin America (encyclopedia.farlex.com). After reading this essay, don’t tell me you don’t know beans about legumes.

I don’t know, but in the Philippines, an unknown lady bought P20 worth (about 45 cents), half a bowl of beans, and brought the beans to the house (also unknown), and found out nobody had ‘the foggiest clue what to do with the beans,’ says author unknown (marketmanila.com).

Beans unknown! I’m surprised. I am a Filipino and proud to say so; this is the Philippines, a great country that even a great many educated Filipinos themselves talk much about in impeccable English or fluent Spanish or articulate Filipino but don’t understand, don’t love – a tropical Garden of Eden where many an Adam and Eve go after many species of useful plants, where you can find many villagers going beans and many citizens going bananas. I love it!

On second thought, I hardly know those beans myself. I don’t remember growing them, harvesting them, handling them, even eating them; not surprising, as I’m a farmer’s son who didn’t have a bean to spend on them. I grew up in the eastern part of Pangasinan in Central Luzon where those unknown beans were, well, unknown.

If the crop be unknown, it means the beans don’t mean anything to the cultivating life of the farmer, to the life of his family, to his wallet or to his wife’s purse. In fact, this bean is relatively unknown in the Philippines, but I understand it is the second most important legume crop in India. And now, you ask, based in Manila, Philippines, why am I writing about India? It’s a great country, and it’s where the beans in my story come from, Sweet Pea.

Jump to Hawaii. From the CTAHR (College of Tropical Agriculture and Human Resources) of the University of Hawaii at Manoa (ctahr.hawaii.edu), I learn that the unknown bean is botanically and completely called Cajanus cajan (L.) Millsp. (van der Maesen), Cajanus cajan van der Maesen for short. If I remember my taxonomy right, Cajanus is the name of the genus, cajan is the name of the species; (L.) means Linnaeus, the first botanist to give the crop a botanical name and published his description of it – he called it Cytisus cajan; Millsp. is the abbreviation of the family name of the botanist Millspaugh who corrected Linnaeus’ original botanical name; and van der Maesen is the one who corrected both botanists after poring over the literature and examining inch by inch a sample of the plant itself to describe it, roots and all. From the database of the FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization), the botanical name is Cajanus cajan (L.) Millsp. (fao.org), and there is no mention of van der Maesen at all. Oh, anytime give me the study of the taxonomy of words, not beans.

Predictably, some people have the patience to find out more, more than just counting beans. I know – I watched Juan V Pancho, the internationally respected Filipino plant taxonomist, at work at the University of the Philippines Los Baños in the late 60s and early 70s. Doing so, he discovered some unknown species. He has moved on to the other side of life, but I can imagine him still poring over old books, old journals, old labels and new specimens, looking for the unknown. Unpredictably, I myself go on looking for the unknown in known or predictable stories. Such as this modern Jack & the beans talk.

The name ‘pigeon pea’ probably originated in the United States, where it was found that the pigeons loved it (icrisat.org). Among its other common names I like are red gram, Angola pea, Congo pea, dahl (India). In Tagalog it’s kadios, in Ilocano kardis. Philippine folklore has it that the pigeon pea is useful in medical therapy: an infusion of leaves is good for cough, diarrhea and abdominal pains. Tender leaves are chewed for stomatitis and spongy gums; pulped leaves are used for sores (stuartxchange.com). In Peru, the leaves make good medicine as infusion for anemia, hepatitis, diabetes, urinary infections and yellow fever (Leslie Taylor, rain-tree.com).

The Indians of India love it more than anyone else. The crop is grown in that country in 3.58 M ha, while in Myanmar it is grown only in 0.56 M ha, in China 0.15 M ha, and in Malawi .123 M ha. Green seeds are consumed fresh as green vegetable; the crushed dry seeds make good feed for poultry & livestock; the green leaves make good fodder for cattle (icrisat.org). The Filipinos are still studying the matter. (I had earlier written about it; see my ‘Serving ICRISAT Science,’ icrisatwatch.blogspot.com).

Among other things, the pigeon pea is drought-tolerant, meaning it can grow well even on dry grounds (cgiar.org). I saw that myself when Department of Agriculture consultant Santiago Obien took me to his Bugnay farm in Ilocos Norte in Northern Luzon in March last year. The water well was empty and gray; the pigeon peas were full and green.

Thinking of the plants under water stress, how could I explain the bean’s survival? Of the fittest it must be. In fact, it more than survives: it thrives. This hasn’t been mentioned in press releases or I haven’t read it in the emails but, you know, I have the curiosity of a cat. (It’s okay. ‘Curiosity killed the cat,’ they warn people like me – they forget that cats have 9 lives!) So, summoning the knowledge I gained from reading literature on my own and from my bright professors and their boring lectures during my overstaying student presence at the College of Agriculture of the University of the Philippines in Los Baños in the 1960s – where it took me 5-1/2 years to finish a 4-year course – I had only one explanation in mind, a hypothesis as it were: The pigeon pea has deep roots. I was sure, but I wasn’t an expert in these things. I didn’t know a bean about drought tolerance.

Googling, it took me about an hour to find support to my little hypothesis, and I found it in the website of the CTAHR (site cited). There, I am told the pigeon pea has ‘an extremely deep-rooting taproot’ and the rest of the roots are thin and reach down to 2 m. There, I imagine those roots soak up the capillary water rising from the underground water. Water goes up naturally. If you ask me about capillary action, I will tell you it is the opposite of the law that says, ‘Water seeks its own level.’ Water goes down naturally. That’s what I know. (Incidentally, the CTAHR acknowledges that ICRISAT has conducted ‘extensive research and breeding with pigeon pea.’ They must know something I didn’t.) From another source, about the roots of Pushkal and the other wonder peas from ICRISAT: These hybrids produce 30% higher root mass than other pigeon pea varieties (icrisat.org). This is important in water-starved soils, which we have plenty of in Asia, Africa, America, Australia – more of the pea roots bring up more of the nutrients from more of the deeper soils.

Historically, cultivation of the pigeon pea dates back to 3,000 years and originated either in Asia (absoluteastronomy.com) or Africa (Jacki Passmore, cited in food.oregonstate.edu). In Indian cuisine, it’s a favorite dhal (dry, dehulled, split seed for cooking) (icrisat.org). It also makes excellent pea soup.

So now, for the first time in history, here’s a revolution you can devour, children.

Mother to this one, ICRISAT names it the Pigeonpea Green Revolution, with the new seeds capable of producing 3-4 tons of peas per hectare, at least 2 times the yield of old varieties in farmers’ fields. ‘Pigeonpea Green Revolution’ also alludes to the first Green Revolution brought about by high-yielding varieties of wheat and rice that changed the economies of the world. The new Green Revolution is based on legumes that are a major source of protein in the developing countries. Because of this extraordinary pigeon pea, former IRRI Director General MS Swaminathan, a widely acclaimed and world-awarded Indian scientist and leader who is currently Chair of the Indian National Commission on Farmers, has predicted that the technological breakthrough ‘will create a Second Green Revolution’ in India, and then the rest of the world. On his part, ICRISAT Director General William Dar is ‘confident that the revolution we started in India with hybrid pigeonpea will soon spread to different parts of the world.’ I agree with that prediction; I share that confidence.

ICRISAT had announced the breakthrough boldly, knowing that ‘Extensive research by reputed organizations across the world in the past 50 years could not succeed in increasing productivity of pigeon pea,’ Dar is quoted by the Times of India as saying (July 2008, epaper.timesofindia.com). Remember, it took ICRISAT a total of 35 long years to achieve that scientific advance. I imagine that, like the Red Queen and Alice in Wonderland, those ICRISAT scientists had been running faster than scientists in other lands just to stay in place – first.

Dar attributed the pigeon pea hybrid success to public-private partnership, prominently with the ICAR (Indian Council of Agricultural Research), Acharya NG Ranga Agricultural University, and Pravardhan Seeds. ‘I welcome more of such partnerships.’ I myself will attribute it also to the discovery by van der Maesen of the wild relative of pigeon pea in the forests of Central India, which had the desirable qualities the scientists were looking for in a pea. Conservation-minded, I welcome such forests.

Resistance to diseases and a massive root system were among 2 qualities transferred from the wild variety to the cultivated pigeon pea. Those transfers were achieved via a technological breakthrough that had something to do with the breeding technique. After a total of 35 long years of trying, ICRISAT breeders finally succeeded in creating a pigeon pea hybrid using what is called a cytoplasmic male sterile (CMS) method, an innovation in the breeding of legumes. It is a complex process, and all I can say is that the CMS technique prevents self-fertilization (inbreeding) and allows cross-fertilization (hybridization), in this case the cultivated pigeon pea crossed with a wild relative, Cajanus cajanifolius. In inbreeding, as happens in most crops, the years of cultivation bring a continuing deterioration of yield, among other things; in hybridization, the performance is always high because the seeds are always of new genetic materials and always superior, the hybrid vigor always max. The pea soup is always thick.

I am the one who calls it The Beans Revolution. Beans, because there are a number of these new varieties of the pigeon pea, 3 of them being Asha, Laxmi, and Pushkal, the last being the first commercial pigeon pea hybrid in the world. Revolution, because as the election of Barack Obama, the first African-American President, is a radical change in the history of the United States of America, so is the current and impending intrusion of the pigeon pea into the thinking and farming systems of Asia, Africa, America, and Australia. If Obama has shown outstanding performance as a presidential campaigner under challenging social circumstances, this new pigeon pea has shown outstanding performance as a productive crop under challenging site conditions. Obama is more than just a new US President – he represents change in many spheres of American life, including abroad, as we can imagine. This pigeon pea is more than just a new crop – it touches on many areas of agriculture, including conservation of natural resources, as we shall see.

In the dry tropics such as India, the pigeon pea was a desirable crop in poor soils. It had no problem with lack of water or lack of fertilizer; it was the scientists themselves who had problems with the pigeon pea. They could not advise the farmers to grow it because there were many problems with it. The crop was too weak for insect pests and diseases. It also was too leafy for the farmer’s good. It also grew too slowly for the farmer’s comfort. It also yielded too little for the farmer’s security.

The plant breeders said, ‘Needs improvement.’ That is why scientists of ICRISAT had been trying to develop a variety of pigeon pea that was quite different from the old. With extreme difficulty. Their kind of science they could handle, but the length of time they could hardly manage. In contrast to genetic engineering, conventional plant breeding is slow-motion photography – with Mother Nature handling all the camera work.

In 1974, 2 years after ICRISAT was set up in India, the Institute’s plant scientists started intense improvement work on pigeon pea with full support for R&D by ICAR, and it was only more than 3 decades later when they achieved the breakthrough (icrisat.org). The generation of the world’s first commercial pigeon pea hybrid through CMS was announced in 2005; such a feat was achieved with Pravardhan Seeds as private-sector partner.

In 1997, a new pigeon pea hybrid was tested in China; it didn’t take root. One of the new pigeon peas, ICPH 7035, is now taking roots in Southern China. Pigeon pea is currently grown in 150,000 ha in Gungxi and Yunnan provinces (icrisat.org). The Yuanmou Pigeonpea Farmers’ Association in Yunnan Province is now growing it for seeds for sale in the country and possibly nearby Myanmar. The Research Institute of Resource Insects, along with the directorates of forestry and science & technology, is leading the Chinese effort in introducing 2 hybrids, ICPH 2671 (Pushkal) and ICPH 3381, which I suppose are like peas in a pod. ICRISAT is promoting hybrid pigeon pea next in Brazil, Tanzania, Malawi and the Philippines.

In 2005, after 35 years of hard science, ICRISAT scientists, led by KB Saxena, ICRISAT’s Principal Breeder of Pigeon Pea, succeeded in developing the breeding process for the commercialization of the pea that is:

(1) a fast grower
(2) not bushy
(3) not susceptible to major pests & diseases
(4) not sensitive to length of days
(5) resistant to waterlogging and salinity
(6) a high yielder
(7) a natural mulcher of soils – it produces much biomass and drops off all its leaves at the time of harvest.

Pushkal is the name given to the first commercial pigeon pea variety by Pravardhan Seeds, who was the private sector partner in developing the hybrid (icrisat.org). Pushkal can be harvested in 170-180 days. It is highly resistant to Fusarium wilt and sterility mosaic, 2 major diseases of this pea. With sterility mosaic, a farmer’s loss can be devastating: 100%. With the hybrid, 10-12 kg of seeds to a hectare is all that is necessary for planting. It yields up to 4,000 kg, which is 5 times more than that of the best non-hybrids, considering an average of 800 kg – all in all, a quantum leap. With the ICRISAT breakthrough, pigeon pea becomes the world’s first crop that yields much, needs little. Jack climbs the beanstalk and finds the hen that eats so few grains and lays so many golden eggs.

The beans are highly nutritious, containing up to 28% protein, 10 times more fat, 5 times more Vitamin A, and 3 times more Vitamin C than ordinary peas (encyclopedia.farlex.com). Birgit Bradtke (tropicalpermaculture.com) has a personal list of the good things about pigeon pea:

(1) Beans ground into flour make good food.
(2) The peas make nutritious animal feed or fodder.
(3) Flowers attract bees that pollinate plants.
(4) Plants can be pruned often for mulch.
(5) Peas enrich the soil with nutrients.
(6) Pea hedges make good windbreaks.
(7) The plants make good green manure.
(8) The stems make good firewood.
(9) Peas make good living trellises for climbers.
(10) Pigeon peas grow just about anywhere.

Pigeon peas also make excellent nurse plants for corn (MCT, plantpath.cornell.edu). With their deep and massive roots, pigeon peas are now being mainly grown for soil buildup in 150,000 ha of hilly slopes of Southern China; with their relatively fast growth and strong root systems, the peas stop soil erosion and otherwise regenerate degraded sites with plant nutrients coming from deep below the soil surface (icrisat.org). Since it’s a perennial, it can be grown and remains there for several years from one planting, covering the soil and minimizing erosion, according to Zong Xuxiao of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences in Beijing. The Chinese know something we don’t. Also in China, they are now producing foods and drinks from the seeds (cgiar.org).

Since hybrid seeds are expensive, in India, the MS Swaminathan Foundation is now empowering women to grow the hybrid pigeon peas and produce seeds in such a manner that small farmers can afford them. This is no small matter as India produces 85% of the world’s pigeon pea beans.

News from Australia is that a hybrid pigeon pea has the potential to produce 8 tons of beans to a hectare (aciar.gov.au), max. Even with the current 4 tons, already that’s a max of eggs. In the Philippines, that’s a max of pesos. So there you have it; Pushkal is the first modern hen that lays the golden eggs in this version of Old Jack & the new beans talk. 57 hybrid cultivars of pigeon pea have been released in Asia, Africa, Australia and the USA (icrisat.org). That means Jack’s hen today is commercial and now selling in a market near you.

(Next) The Beans Revolution. 2:
How To Wage A War Of Understanding

How to rewrite science creatively

2009-01-19T07:35:00.000+08:00

I will tell you what I will do before I will rewrite a difficult, technical article, abstract, paragraph or sentence, but I will not tell you which ones I will do first, or which ones I will not do:
√ Read on the topic from some other sources.
√ Ask someone who knows more about it.
√ Look up the meanings of terms you don’t know. I often look up the meanings of even familiar words, such as approach, because some people don’t look at this like I look at it. Compare with strategy, point of view, methodology if you like.
√ Ask somebody else to do it for you, and compensate him well.
√ Choose another selection or article.
√ Rewrite sentence by sentence or phrase by phrase.
√ Give up, but only after trying your best.
√ Read it 9 times.
√ Think of metaphors.
√ Relate it to something you are familiar with.
√ Rewrite half or part of it and see what happens to your understanding of the whole thing.
√ Go to the encyclopedia and search for related articles.
√ Go to the Internet and browse.
√ Gather more information and try to relate them, no matter how vaguely.
√ Do it anyway. You need practice.

A pragmatic approach

2009-01-18T18:49:00.000+08:00

The following is the abstract of a paper by Graham Badley published in the European Educational Research Journal 2(2): 296-308: ‘The Crisis in Educational Research: A pragmatic approach.’ Can you rewrite it?

This article first identifies and discusses four main causes of the crisis in educational research. These are summarized as false dualism, false primacy, false certainty and false expectations. False dualism is the apartheid that divides positivist and constructivist researchers, with positivists believing in an objective reality and constructivists arguing that reality is a social construction. False primacy is the view that the positivist paradigm has come to dominate research to the detriment of more open, pluralistic and critically reflective approaches. False certainty is the argument that in an increasingly complex and uncertain world, researchers have retreated to a reactionary position in order to shore up the dominant paradigm. False expectations is the case that governments, especially, are demanding more evidence-based research in order to provide urgent solutions to educational problems. The second part of the article shows how taking a pragmatic approach may help us resolve some of the difficulties identified. For example, pragmatists would not privilege any one paradigm or methodology over another but would argue that both science and constructivism offer different sets of tools for investigating different aspects of the world. This also means that pragmatists see inquiry not as discovering what is really out there but as offering more or less useful descriptions to meet our particular needs and purposes. The third part of the article argues that pragmatism is not an alternative model of research but is more a working point of view or a perspective which is admittedly modest and, so pragmatists think, appropriately fuzzy. What a pragmatic approach to research actually leads to, through reflection, is a kind of useful if temporary equilibrium amongst the community of inquirers. Part of this approach is the rejection of the idea that scientific research can be used with certainty to specify educational practice. All it can provide is possible lines of action.

Rethink organic fertilizers

2009-01-18T18:21:00.000+08:00

Here are excellent exercises in creative rethinking, all original, all mine. Each pair of sentences are juxtaposed against each other. Unless specified, in each case, I ask you: What is/are the implications? What should be done?

(1) Organic fertilizers. Raw materials for commercial organic fertilizers include manure from commercial poultry and livestock farms. For the control of pests and diseases, the animals are given antibiotics; for faster growth, they receive growth hormones.

(2) Stakeholders. All citizens are stakeholders in the progress of the country. A stakeholder is one who has a share of an interest in an enterprise.

(3) Good Agricultural Practices. These are proven techniques in farming that reward the farmer properly and well. There are many different kinds of farmers in many different locations.

(4) Transfer of knowledge. Here is a package of technology that promises to triple the income of the farmer if he follows the instructions in the package. Only 5 out of 100 farmers follow the instructions.

(5) Breeding & Selection. Plant breeders know breeding, and they are always coming out with new varieties of crops. Farmers know selection, and they are always coming up with selected outstanding individuals from their crops.

(6) Capacity Building. In one countryside project, the villagers were trained to create commercially appealing handicraft from locally available materials to help the unemployed earn from their labors. The funds were specifically for such training.

(7) Infertile soils. Extensionists and experts speak of the need to rehabilitate infertile soils by applying fertilizers. What are other ways of viewing the situation of an infertile soil?

Rewrite 'The Ecosystem Approach'

2009-01-18T17:38:00.000+08:00

Can you rewrite this so that a non-scientist can understand it? It is from the Introduction to the article on 'The Ecosystem Approach' by the Convention on Biological Diversity.

The ecosystem approach is a strategy for the integrated management of land, water and living resources that promotes conservation and sustainable use in an equitable way. Application of the ecosystem approach will help to reach a balance of the three objectives of the Convention. It is based on the application of appropriate scientific methodologies focused on levels of biological organization which encompass the essential processes, functions and interactions among organisms and their environment. It recognizes that humans, with their cultural diversity, are an integral component of ecosystems.

An invitation to a party

2009-01-10T11:07:00.000+08:00

This is the terrace of La Huerta at Antipolo, Rizal. I was there last year courtesy of the owner, Luz Buhay Lorenzo, and I found the place subtly relaxing, the air invigorating, the food excellent, and the chocolate superb! Thanks, Luz. The place itself is a sumptuous feast to the soul.

Bloody Christ! Fr Anton's

2009-01-10T09:38:00.000+08:00

19 August 2008, Sam Martin and I saw Fr Anton Pascual at Caritas. Fr Anton had protege painters, all prisoners, and all around were their paintings. The painter of this Christ (as well as the others) is at the stage of his painting life when he is still copying from the master. I passed that stage too in learning how to write well.

While Global Learning looms

2009-01-09T12:25:00.000+08:00

I’m writing a book

In fact I’ve rewriting it for the nth time now. 2 of the chapters in this book you can already read if you visit ‘Vanguards in War & Peace,’ vanguards2.blogspot.com).

The Global Learning I’m referring to is about global earning coming from credit created by banks not out of actual investors’ capital – the whole world is about to learn that once everybody realizes that, we should not be surprised if Atlas Shrugged.

The Inquirer says. In AIG’s fall, we sinned all

2009-01-09T10:56:00.011+08:00

Doctors tell you only half the story of Cancer. That’s the half you know. Economists tell us only half the story of Corruption. Do we know which half?

2 assumptions, 2 sets of data. One, the Philippines is the most corrupt in the world. Two, the Philippine media is the most free in the world. If your mind is statistically inclined, if you go by correlation, you’ll go crazy. Ergo, the Philippines is most corrupt because the Philippine media is most free. Ergo, if you want to control corruption, control the media.

Control yourself!

I don’t believe the Philippine media is most corrupt, and neither do I believe the Philippines is most corrupt. No, I’m not part of the traditional media. Yes, I’m a Filipino and I love my own, my native land.

Mind you, Cancer is not the Big C; Corruption is, and nothing is bigger. Cancer is individual; Corruption is social. While American authors like to write about individual rights, I, Filipino author, like to write about social wrongs. I don’t believe in human rights; I don’t believe in social wrongs either. Human rights is individualistic; social wrongs can never be right.

In the Philippines, if I remember right, from the time of President Elpidio Quirino and up to now, still corruption tops the surveys, corruption tops the news, corruption tops the letters to the editor, corruption tops the columns, corruption tops the TV and radio talk shows, corruption tops the emails. Today, corruption has become an ubiquitous, obtrusive infomercial selling the story of the opposition running for office 2 years from now. Corruption is the breakfast of champion crusaders for consumers’ attention – and the media is very accommodating. It’s disgusting.

Know what? The Philippine Daily Inquirer editorial ‘Cost of corruption’ of 12 February 2008 (opinion.inquirer.net) says, ‘Graft and corruption has been a fact of national life since post-Liberation days. Almost every administration has had its big and sensational graft cases.’ The Inquirer says.

So, according to the Inquirer, no President has been exempt from corruption. Did you know we have had 13 Philippine Presidents since Manuel Luis Quezon (1935)? I believe the Inquirer, so, why complain about corruption now, and in multimedia presentations yet!?

‘Corruption’ covers a multitude of sins, a legion of sinners. It covers a lot of territory, much more than the oracles of corruption have covered. In my country, or elsewhere. So far, corruption has not been covered completely; it has only been covered up.

Lo and behold, I found corruption in an unlikely place where I wasn’t looking. In the Inquirer, of course. The Inquirer says, ‘Filed under Government, Civil unrest.’ That was the line entry above the first paragraph of ‘Vindication for a soldier,’ the article by Ramon J Farolan under his column Reveille (22 December, opinion.inquirer.net). The Inquirer and/or Farolan just gave me a headache: I’m in Manila and with my Perry Mason-CSI-whetted instinct, I have looked and listened hard here and there for the civil unrest and so far I’m clueless. Government? You don’t have to look for it; everybody’s talking about it, except that many people, including many media including the Inquirer, treat Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo as The Government, no more, no less.

Looking at the Inquirer webpage again, I find it very revealing. I’m referring to both the article and the 2 tags (Filed under). I find that ‘Government’ is going too wide and ‘Civil unrest’ is going too far. In handling products, that would be ‘mislabeling.’ Now then, that is a double lesson in tagging an Internet article: Over-enthused, you can over-tag.

The Inquirer should file ‘Vindication for a soldier’ under ‘Corruption’ to vindicate itself. Farolan writes about Philippine corruption and its relation to the threat, or treat, of US Government economic assistance. The MCC (Millennium Challenge Corporation) of the US of A has announced that it will not extend such assistance to the Philippines because she has failed, in the view of MCC, in her ‘control of corruption.’ My country is helpless. If I understand Farolan right and the MCC right, the MCC is not going to help the helpless. The Inquirer says?

On top of all the sad thoughts he has about his own country, Farolan writes that the World Bank has announced that the Philippines ‘ranked worst in corruption among East Asia’s Top 10 economies.’ It’s Farolan’s country, and he’s ashamed of it.

It’s my country too, in case anybody asked, as it has been for the last 68 years; I never left it, and I have never been ashamed of it. Not that I remember, not now, not ever. In fact, I’m proud of it. Why, the venerable World Bank itself has just said that the Philippines ranks quote among East Asia’s Top 10 economies unquote! Glad to hear that, and from the proud World Bank too. I say the level of corruption is a direct indication of a country’s propensity for amassing wealth and, you know, you cannot steal what isn’t there. Yes, I’m sick and tired of hearing that the Philippines is The Sick Man of Asia. And yes, I believe in the World Bank.

I’m Ilocano, but I never lost my faith in the Filipino. Otherwise, I would have gone to Brunei 44 years ago when my older and only brother Emilio wanted me to join him, another agriculturist. He was making good money as an OFW (Overseas Filipino Worker). Don’t they all? I would have been an early model of an intellectual OFW, a William Shakespeare-quoting OFW, a writer making very good money on talent and good intentions, would you believe? In the Philippines, a John F Kennedy-quoting writer makes good copy, yet he makes precious little. I can quote you George Bernard Shaw if you like, and Christina Rossetti, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning – and Romans 12, if you dare. Good quotes don’t earn you income; they only earn you praise.

As an OFW, my brother was then sending us, the honest aggie I believed he was, enough British pounds – it might as well have been gold – to make the neighbors green with envy. If I had gone to Brunei, I would have stayed and never ever had to worry about corruption in the Philippines. Or worry about writing and starving.

I’m not starving now, but I’m worried because, like I told you at the beginning, it’s been all over the media for years but actually we haven’t heard enough of corruption. Or, as far as I know, so far the story is only half-told. And you don’t know which half.

So, I’d like to tell you The Other Half Of The Story of Corruption. Here, in the Philippines. There in the rest of Asia, in Africa, in the Americas, in Australia.

Let it be known that the ADB (Asian Development Bank) is much concerned; this bank launched its ‘Second Governance and Anticorruption Action Plan’ in July 2006 yet (adb.org). Remember, the ADB is based in the Philippines, a country notorious even among Filipinos here and abroad. ‘The Philippines is a basket case,’ you hear earnest Filipinos say that. So, if the ADB people are ashamed of my country, I don’t blame them. If the Filipinos are ashamed of their own country, they are welcome to blame themselves.

Corruption stinks! And the odor is transferable.

So you will have to excuse me if I talk about it as if I could do something about it.

Where is my own, my native land in the list of corrupt countries? According to PERC (Political and Economic Risk Consultancy), according to Steven Rood, this year, ‘for the 2nd consecutive year, the Philippines has the dubious distinction of being the worst rated country’ (22 March 2008, lifepositive.com). We’re #1. Thanks for the information. With PERC, today you don’t have to be good to be rated tops.

Accordingly, the MCC of the US of A has insisted (advised is the word used) that the Philippine Government ‘intensify efforts to fight this evil’ (Jose Katigbak, 15 December 2008, philstar.com). There is only one problem there: The fact is that they claim Government is corrupt, so I say she cannot fight herself.

That’s a fact. Now, let us look at more facts.

In 2006, the TI (Transparency International) came up with a new measure, its international ranking in corruption, and placed the Philippines down at#121 by way of CPI (Corruption Perception Index), where #1 is up, Highly Clean: #1 Finland, #1 New Zealand, #4 Denmark, #5 Singapore, #9 Australia, #11 United Kingdom, #14 Canada, #16 Germany, #17 Japan, #18 France, #20 USA, #23 Spain, #34 Israel, #34 Taiwan, #42 South Korea, #44 Malaysia, #63 Thailand, #70 India, #70 Mexico, #111 Vietnam. Also #121 were Benin, Gambia, Guyana, Honduras, Nepal, Russia, Rwanda, Swaziland. #130 was Indonesia; #160 were Iraq and Myanmar,#163 Haiti (transparency.org). Yes, Russia is in league with the Philippines. Thanks for the info, TI!

And in 2008, TI reports that the Philippines is now #141 by CPI, slipping down 20 pt, bad; Russia is down by 25 pt, badder. Going up is #121 Vietnam, going down is #126 Indonesia. #178 are Iraq and Myanmar, down by 18 points. #180 is Somalia, baddest of all (transparency.org).

As I do the World Bank, it should be apparent that I believe in Transparency International. However, it should be clear that what TI is coming out with is data on perception, based on what people (their respondents) think, not based on records; that is to say, the TI data is not transparency but apparency, if I may coin a word. Thanks but no thanks, TI. The Philippines is much deeper in corruption than the US of A, apparently. Looks deceive.

A self-styled Asia Political Risk correspondent, Andrew Marshall has a very ingenious way of measuring the developing countries’ ‘propensity for corruption’ – just count the number of parking tickets issued to foreign diplomats in Manhattan. And the number shows, according to Marshall, that ‘many Asian nations fare very poorly in upholding the rule of law’ (17 December 2008, abs-cbnnews.com). That’s based on the records but, I don’t see how violating traffic rules is an indication of corruption. If you say they are correlated, again that’s apparency.

And, wait a minute, when we say ‘corruption,’ are we thinking the same thoughts? No, I don’t think so. So, let’s define our terms. Transparency International defines it this way: ‘Corruption is the abuse of entrusted power for private gain’ (transparency.org). Thanks, TI; I think it’s a good definition. In fact, I love it!

To test that definition, let’s apply the Case Method of Harvard Business School and analyze what I shall call here ‘Money or File?’

I park in a non-parking zone, and here comes a policeman in proper uniform. He is smiling, polite. ‘Good morning, Sir. Your driver’s license please?’ I am feeling bad, not polite. If I hand over to him my driver’s license, he will file it at the police precinct with his report, and I will have to take it from there. Not bad but inconvenient. I don’t want to bother myself any further, so I simply bribe the policeman; richer and poorer by $10, we call it quits. ‘Good day, Mr Policeman.’ ‘Good day, Sir. Nice talking to you.’

My Question: Who is corrupt: the policeman or I am? My Answer: No, not me. The policeman is corrupt; I am the corrupter. Between the 2 of us lies corruption. I am the more guilty, because I caused the corruption; I am the Tempter, the Serpent in the Garden of Eden. The policeman did not corrupt me – I corrupted him. Eve did not corrupt the Serpent – the Serpent corrupted her. So, if you have 1 million cars in Metro Manila and half of the drivers are like me, that’s a population of 500,000 corrupters. Imagine that!

Inconvenience leads to corruption. And that’s small c, small change. The Big C comes from the small c. So, we have to redefine our terms. Now, in the Philippines maybe we can learn from Manila Times Editorial Consultant Juan T Gatbonton who says (1 December, manilatimes.net):

Political corruption is the saddest example of the well-known ‘tragedy of the commons’ – the despoiling of a collectively owned facility that provides public goods.

Gatbonton’s declaration looks all right and bright to me, but it’s too vague. It doesn’t explain. And I don’t want to limit the discussion to political corruption. It doesn’t expand.

So, from the Philippines I roam the world and in a Google instant I reach India, where Swati Chopra is saying, ‘Let’s explore the solutions’ about corruption (May 2001, lifepositive.com). He also says:

The fact remains that the individual can certainly not shirk responsibility. For the individual is the smallest unit in this complex web of interrelationships we call ‘society.’ If we are all interconnected, how can a minority (or a majority, as the case may be) only be responsible for a phenomenon as widespread as corruption?

Everyone is related to everybody else. So, you cannot tell me you are not involved in corruption. We all are. So, combining American, Indian and Filipino ideas, I believe I can now provide the more intelligent definition and it is this:

Corruption is the act as well as the cause of the abuse of entrusted power for private gain.

Now then, with this new definition of corruption, I gain 3 insights:

(1) It takes 2 to corrupt.
(2) The corrupter is more guilty than the corrupt.
(3) More often than not, we are the corrupter.

It takes 2 to tango. To paraphrase Jose Rizal, my hero: ‘There are no corrupt where there are no corrupters.’ My name is Corrupter, and my number is Legion.

Big or little, we are all guilty of corruption! So, stop pointing at people, because when you do, 3 fingers are pointing at you.

Embarrassed? Oh, please don’t go. I’m not finished.

Let us go back to Andrew Marshall, the measurer of the developing countries’ propensity for corruption, implying that the developed countries have less corruption or none at all. This is plain and simple elitism. Or nonsense. If the developing countries were the only ones corrupt, then the United Nations is not very smart declaring 9 December as ‘International Anti-Corruption Day,’ is it?

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon should know better. Corruption is all over the globe, the bigger the economy, the bigger the corruption. And yes, the corrupt gets his due; the corrupter gets greedy. ‘AIG got greedy,’ says Shah Gilani (18 September, marketoracle.co.uk). Greed leads to corruption. So now AIG is selling everywhere its insurance businesses in Hongkong, China, Singapore, Vietnam, Malaysia, South Korea, Australia, Thailand, and the Philippines (Cathy Chan & Co, bloomberg.com). Now we’ve seen that in AIG’s fall, we’ve sinned all.

Corruption example from Europe: Stephen Webb (9 October, abcnews.go.com) reports that some Barclays executives went on a luxurious ‘all-expenses paid’ business trip to Italy the day after the UK Government put up $865 billion to bail out the banking system. Of that, Eliza from London writes, ‘We need to stop their greed before they have squandered all our money on pay, bonus and flights of fancy like this.’

Corruption example from the US of A: I do declare that the amount of bailout is a direct measure of the developed countries’ propensity for corruption. The $700 billion bailout of the banking system indicates the amount involved, in the words of Richard C Cook, of ‘bad loans made previously with credit which the banking system created out of thin air (globalresearch.ca). Cook should know what he’s talking about: he’s been a US Federal Government analyst. I was reading his 19 September essay ‘Impacts of the financial crisis: The US is becoming an impoverished nation’ – I can send you the text I downloaded if you like. The title alone of his forthcoming book, We Hold These Truths: The Hope Of Monetary Reform, reveals his expertise.

Cook explains:

You see, the catastrophe was accomplished with money lent on margin. Only a small fraction of funding by investment banks, mortgage companies, brokerages, equity funds, hedge funds, commodities futures speculators, etc comes from actual investor capital. The rest – up to ninety-seven percent, in the case of commodities futures contracts – is credit self-created by the banks.

Credit self-created by the banks, not based on actual investor capital. This is Corruption; it’s so huge it’s the defining corruption in the world. The Big C.

The financial crisis is all corruption is all bad loans, and I mean it both ways. Applying our definition of corruption, the one extending the loan he created out of thin air is the corrupter and he knows it; the one enticed to obtain that loan is the corrupt, even if he claims he doesn’t know anything at all. I memorized this quote more than 50 years ago, and it’s pertinent today:

Ignorance of the law excuses no one; not that everyone knows the law, but ‘tis an excuse everyone will plead, and no one will know how to confute him.

Question: Now then, which is the most corrupt country in the world?

Answer: From where I got that quote. Certainly not the Philippines, not Finland, not New Zealand, not Denmark, not Singapore, not Australia, not Canada, not Germany, not Japan, not France, not Spain, not Israel, not Taiwan, not South Korea, not Malaysia, not Thailand, not India, not Mexico, not Vietnam, not Honduras, not Nepal, not Russia, not Indonesia, not Iraq, not Myanmar, not Zimbabwe.

You don’t need a survey to find out; just use your head. Or read the papers.

About the smaller c, the case of the Philippines, the Inquirer says, ‘Graft and corruption has been a fact of national life since post-Liberation days.’

You don’t believe the Inquirer.

Actually, what the Inquirer says is only half the story. I have just told you half the story. You don’t know which half?

Christmas Science.

2008-12-25T23:18:00.000+08:00

Thinking Theory & Practice of Xmas

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all! Including those who do not believe in Christmas, including those who do not like me.

That is my gift to all of you, bare, no wrapping, no floral decoration, no ribbon, no box, no Scotch tape, no frame. No kidding.

I’m trying out a new theory and practice of Christmas. You know what? I think I just invented Christmas Science. Let X be the unknown Christ who gave us Christmas. By ‘Christmas Science,’ I don’t mean outright knowledge or verified knowledge or systematized knowledge; rather, I mean a field of study seeking to understand the civilized human phenomenon of gift-giving, resulting in human insights. In an uncivilized society, a gift given would be a human sacrifice to the gods.

I write Science, not Fiction.

Theory & Practice of Christmas

Yesterday, Christmas Eve, I had a flash of insight. I asked myself a very different kind of question, the kind of which I never asked myself before:

‘If Christmas is the theory, what is the practice?’

‘For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life’ (John 3:16 NRSV). This is the biggest gift, the best gift of all to all, right?

God gave us a gift one Christmas day. Now then, is the practice of Christmas the giving of gifts on Christmas Day? If you say it is not, then you may be denying God’s gift to mankind.

Alternatively is the practice of believing in Jesus as the Christ the spirit of Christmas?

I think that the giving of gifts as a proof that we believe in the Messiah is not practice enough, no matter how expensive or beautiful or touching or meaningful the gift.

Because the practice of Christmas is not in the giving of the gifts. Christmas is not a 1-day event, to be celebrated every time the 25th of December comes. Christmas is a 365-day concern, a 24/7 affair. Christ was born one day, but that was only the beginning; the Christian era did not end as it began.

So, where do we find the spirit of Christmas if not in the giving of gifts? That depends on the gift.

Theory & Practice of Love

I found the true spirit of Christmas in the New Testament. I found love. Love is the biggest gift, the best gift of all to all.

Love is the theory. Looking for the practice, I am back to the theory.

In 1 Corinthians 13, the Apostle Paul writes to the Corinthians about love; here is that chapter, all of 272 words (NRSV):

If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.

Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

Love never ends. But as for prophecies, they will come to an end; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will come to an end. For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part; but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end.

When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways.

For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known.

And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.

What is love? In fact, 1 Corinthians 13 does not define love; it merely describes it: Love is patient, kind, not envious, not arrogant, not rude and so on and so forth. It is endless. Love is the greatest.

The Big Question is: How? How do we love? If love is the theory, what is the practice?

Christ of course has given us the First and Greatest Love Commandment: ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul, and with all your mind’ (Matthew 22: 37 NRSV). And the Second is like the First: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself’ (Matthew 22: 39 NRSV). Nonetheless, the question remains: ‘But how do we love?’

I found my answer in another epistle of Saint Paul, this one to Romans. Saint Paul’s Christian instructions on how to love, here is Romans 12, my favorite, all 386 words of it (NRSV):

I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God – what is good and acceptable and perfect.

Dedicate all of yourself, every single day, to what is good, which is what God wants you to do. You have accepted the faith, but faith is not enough. Be Christians not only in words but also in works. Not only in theory but also in practice. Only in practice can you know what are good works, what are pleasing, what are perfect.

For by the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think of yourself more highly than you ought to think, but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned. For as in one body we have many members, and not all the members have the same function, so we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually we are members one of another.

Do not be proud; do not be vainglorious. Remember, we all are one in God, and as members of one body, we have different functions but we belong to each other; not one is more important than the other. A body without any of its members is the less; a body with all of its members is good, pleasing and perfect in the eyes of God.

We have gifts that differ according to the grace given to us: prophecy, in proportion to faith; ministry, in ministering; the teacher, in teaching; the exhorter, in exhortation; the giver, in generosity; the leader, in diligence; the compassionate, in cheerfulness.

Even as we are one, each one of us must be and do the best we can. So, if you are a prophet, prophesy; if a teacher, teach; if an encourager, encourage; if a giver, give; if a leader, lead; if a cheerer, cheer.

Let love be genuine; hate what is evil, hold fast to what is good; love one another with mutual affection; outdo one another in showing honor. Do not lag in zeal, be ardent in spirit, serve the Lord. Rejoice in hope, be patient in suffering, persevere in prayer. Contribute to the needs of the saints; extend hospitality to strangers.

Love always, love truly. Detach yourself from the bad and cling to the good. Love one another more and more. Do good ardently all the time. Be happy even as you hope; be patient even as you suffer; be constant even as you pray. Contribute to fill a need; be kind to strangers.

Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them. Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep. Live in harmony with one another; do not be haughty, but associate with the lowly; do not claim to be wiser than you are.

Be good to those who do you bad, every one of them. Empathize: Be happy with those who are happy. Sympathize: Lament with those who lament. Do not quarrel with one another. Do not be proud; connect with the ignorant; relate with the poor; do not claim to know more than you do.

Do not repay anyone evil for evil, but take thought for what is noble in the sight of all. If it is possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all. Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave room for the wrath of God; for it is written, ‘Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.’ No, ‘if your enemies are hungry, feed them; if they are thirsty, give them something to drink; for by doing this you will heap burning coals on their heads.’

Not eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth; rather, think of what is good to all. As much as possible, be at peace with everyone. Never avenge a wrong; let God take care of it. Rather, if your enemy is hungry, give him to eat; if your enemy is thirsty, give him to drink; because, in doing that, you and he will have peace.

Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.

Do not be defeated by evil; rather, defeat evil with good.

My theory of Christmas is that it is a gift of love. The true practice of Christmas is the practice of love.

I said at the beginning of this that I wish ‘Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!’ to those who like me and those who don’t.

The true meaning of Christmas is not the giving of gifts but the gift of giving, the giving of love. And giving love means always giving love; it means trying to be good always and ever. If we stop trying to be good, the world stops for us.

Christmas Science is the science of trying to love. Thanks for trying it on me. Please don’t stop trying!

Christ in tears

2008-12-10T14:07:00.000+08:00

Have you seen Christ in tears? I have. And I know the exact date, 03 December 2008 Manila, and I know the exact place, 4th Floor, Shangri-La Plaza at EDSA-Shaw Blvd, Mandaluyong City, the Philippines. It was a moment of grace. It was through the intercession of one of the Mandaluyong residents, and I thank him.

‘Christ in Tears’ is what I call Tony Meer’s painting of Christ that I saw on the opening evening of his 3rd 1-man show at the Shangri-La on Wednesday. This is a long-haired, bearded and moustachioed Messiah crying.

‘This is my Christ,’ Tony Meer says. ‘He’s not suffering. These are tears of joy. He is happy to sacrifice himself.’

I’ve never seen anything like it, I tell Tony Meer, in awe. Christ in tears. I’ll be damned!

Here are images of Tony Meer's other paintings in exhibit - photos by Tony Meer's boys.

Reproductive Health 101.

2008-11-30T07:40:00.000+08:00

Let’s make love as if it’s just the animal in us?

Love for sale. That’s the oldest profession in the world. In the Philippines, the ladies and gentlemen who are proponents of Senate Bill 40, SB 43, SB 622, SB 1256 and SB 1299, and House Bill 5043, all with their Gospel of Reproductive Health and their Prophecy of Sustainable Human Development, perhaps don’t realize it, but with all that insistent talk about the State guaranteeing universal access to medically safe, legal, affordable and quality reproductive health care services, methods, techniques, devices, equipment, drugs, medicines, supplies and pertinent information, essentially each of those bills makes love for sale. Cheap!

If you want to buy my wares, follow me and climb the stairs.
Love for sale.

I’ve heard that before. So, this is my plea to Senators Rodolfo G Biazon, Panfilo M Lacson, Jinggoy P Ejercito-Estrada, and Miriam Defensor-Santiago; and to Representatives Edcel C Lagman, Janette L Garin, Narciso D Santiago III, Mark Llandro Mendoza, Ana Theresia ‘Risa’ Hontiveros-Baraquel, and Eleandro Jesus F Madrona:

Please don’t refer to it simply as ‘Reproductive Health.’ And please don’t reduce the whole subject to ‘Reproductive Health and Population Development’ – before you have properlydefined ‘reproductive health’ as well as ‘population development.’ You can’t be intelligent discussing without defining your terms first. You want a debate, I’ll give you a debate. Anytime, anywhere. But first things first. Definitions are premises; we have to agree on the premises first – unless of course you don’t really want a high-minded debate.

What do you mean Reproductive Health?

‘Reproductive Health’ makes it sound like it’s all mechanical, all procedural, all sequential, all logical, and can easily be arranged for by the State providing universal access to all those paraphernalia and prophylaxis.

Who will buy? Who would like to sample my supply?
Who’s prepared to pay the price, for a trip to Paradise?
Love for sale.

Let’s concentrate on one bill, which I have downloaded (congress.gov.ph); if you’ve downloaded one, you’ve downloaded them all. And so HB 5043 reduces love to the animal in us. ‘Reproductive’ is so clinical, antiseptically clean. Not my style. Between husband and wife, 5043 looks at it as if it’s all just mating, copulation, sexual intercourse; it’s just between 2 consenting adults. You make love thinking of ‘responsible parenthood, informed choice, birth spacing!?’ 5043 makes it all sound like love is something to be wary of, even to avoid by all means necessary or available. Or to interrupt.

I expected much, much more substance from Lagman, Garin & Co.

Do you think only of sexual intercourse as an animal act, where penis meets vagina? How biological can you get? I don’t want to listen to your ‘Vagina Monologue’ (or ‘Penis Monologue,’ if it comes to that). But if you think of it as making love, it’s beautiful! I know, even if you didn’t. It’s the sweetest thing, if you’re in love. It’s a different story if you’re not. 5043 doesn’t care.

Let the poets pipe of love in their childish way;
I know every type of love, better far than they.
If you want the thrill of love, I’ve been through the mill of love;
Old love, new love, every love but true love.

When I was a bachelor (until 27), I had several girl friends, not necessarily one after the other, and at least 3 others had hard crushes on me, but with all of them I never went beyond. There never was invasion of privacy. That’s respect for the dignity of womanhood. Does ‘Reproductive Health’ really have respect for the dignity of womanhood? Among its 4,400 words, HB 5043 contains neither the word ‘dignity’ nor ‘womanhood,’ and that’s a shame.

RB 5043 purports to be the #1 Gospel of Health for the Filipinos today. Technically, it’s being marketed as the proper ‘national policy.’ Once declared national policy, we have no choice.

It’s Choice, Edcel Lagman says. He is a lawyer and the author of House Bill 5043.
People, it’s your Choice, not his.

It’s Health, says Janette Garin. She is a doctor and the main co-sponsor of 5043.
People, it’s your Health, not hers.

They make it appear as if it’s all about reproduction. So let’s talk reproduction. By definition (American Heritage Dictionary), in art, a reproduction is a copy of the original. In life, a reproduction is a re-creation of something. In biology, reproduction is multiplying the species. In thinking, reproduction is recalling something. In all of the above, being intelligent about it, you are supposed to allow Mother Nature to run her course. You are not supposed to disturb the reproduction process. If it breaks down, you just have to make it work again. You never tamper with the mechanism. So why do you want to tamper with the human reproduction system?

You don’t really want it to stop being productive. I don’t. I’m very productive myself. I have 12 children, 1 mother.

I never believed in a too-big family size as the cause of poverty. Nor laziness. Nor lack of entrepreneurship. Nor lack of education. I’m not rich; food is always a problem, the education of the children too (3 are in college right now). But don’t tell me there are no rich who have more than 4 children. Don’t tell me none of the rich is lazy. Don’t tell me each of the rich is entrepreneurial. Don’t tell me each of the rich has a college degree. And don’t tell me each of the rich uses either tubal ligation, vasectomy, pill, or IUD (intra-uterine device).

Reproductive health? Believe me, my wife and I tried it. Years ago, when the children were not that many, we tried CI (coitus interruptus) once – and that was the end of it. Why do you do it and then interrupt yourself?! Crazy.

We also tried the prophylactic, more popularly called the condom. It worked, but we found out that the pleasure belonged to the seller of the prophylactic, not to us.

So, I don’t like reproductive health. I’m a healthy male. Interruptus and prophylactic aren’t healthy at all to me.

We considered IUD and decided it was too dangerous. It was also an invasion of the woman’s body, and that was not respecting the dignity of womanhood, was it? We considered anti-fertilization pills too, but we were risk-averse – we were not willing to accept the side effects.

And now let me tell you my own story from the beginning.

In 1967, my wife and I had already been married 4 months and enjoyed every minute of those days, when one day it happened. You make love and don’t expect it to happen? I didn’t. She told me she was pregnant. So soon? I was shocked I was going to be a father. Believe me, I was immature (at 27) and knew it and very clearly suggested abortion: ‘Can we?’ She was more shocked.

My wife has never forgiven me for that. And neither has my eldest daughter, she who would have been aborted – her mother had told her in front of me, in anger. ‘Be angry, but do not sin’ (Ephesians 4: 26 NRSV). Be alarmed if you have to, but do not sin. She’s a big girl now, and has daughters of her own, but to this date there has not been any exchange of terms of endearment between us. She’s in Canada and I’m in the Philippines.

My wife and my eldest daughter are proof that if aborted abortion lasts forever, how long will actual abortion last?

Notwithstanding, I have forgiven my wife for not forgiving. I have forgiven my daughter too. And yes, I confessed it to a priest at least 20 years ago and, yes, while it took still many, many years after that, as it proved to be almost impossible, finally I have forgiven myself.

4 children. Don’t think that my wife didn’t work on me. They were 12 siblings themselves, and she had known the practical difficulties herself. We were already having a difficult time raising just 4 children – I wasn’t a good provider; I wasn’t a proper husband either. She was a writer’s widow; now she’s a computer widow – and also because of sneers and sick jokes from officemates, she kept on badgering me about ‘family planning’ or ‘planned parenthood’ or whatever they called it in those days.

6 children. The advocates of family planning never stop, including during office hours. My wife was working in a government office. So, she wanted to have a ligation. Now, the law dictates that the wife needs the husband’s permission to have a ligation, all things being equal. She knew her law, and respected it; she had worked for 1 year at least as stenographer for a lawyer. Knowing what I knew, I was against the idea. I told her an operation, any operation is an invasion of the body, and the body is not built for any invasion especially like that, tampering with the reproductive system. I said that in pregnancy, the woman’s body prepares for the delivery naturally, slowly in 9 months, in other words, it was much safer, Nature designed it that way. But anyway, I said that if she really wanted it, she can go ahead – ‘You can forge my signature (she could if she wanted to; she was good at it) and I will not complain or go to court, I promise you that. But I am not signing.’

Thank God she didn’t do it.
But that wasn’t the end of it.

8 children. If you want to know if a big family is difficult, ask me. (Or ask my mother-in-law, who is 89; she had 12 children herself, 1 husband. My wife is her 2nd daughter.) Do I have regrets? No. But if I were to live again, I would be a better husband and father.

Life is problematic if you make a problem out of your problems. ‘You go get a vasectomy!’ one time my wife confronted me, subdued but livid. ‘Over my dead penis!’ was my instant reply. She didn’t laugh. I wasn’t joking.

12 children. (Actually, we had 13, but our son Ernest Charles died when he was 10 or 11, ‘fever of unknown origin,’ said his death certificate from the RITM (Research Institute for Tropical Medicine) in Alabang. He had been brought by Papa and Mommy Buddy and SusanLacuna, family friends, to the Makati Medical Center. RITM was the last resort.) 12 is big, but if you are one, or if some of the elder children help with the younger ones, as has been happening in my family, a big family is welcome to those whose hearts are big enough to accommodate everyone. It is not the number that counts; it’s the love that goes around. That’s what 5043 is ignorant of.

So, you will understand that if I were a legislator, as a matter of national policy, I wouldn’t propose ‘Reproductive Health.’ Instead, I would propose ‘Family Health’ – I consider family as the basic unit of Philippine society (if not your own), not the reproductive woman as in effect identified by those ladies and gentlemen of Congress.

No, health is not only about reproduction. And no, I don’t believe that health is a human right – I believe it’s a family right. ‘Human right’ makes it independent of the family, and I believe in the family. The family is one body. ‘Indeed, the body does not consist of one member but many.’ And ‘God has so arranged the body, giving the greater honor to the inferior member, that there may be no dissension within the body, but the members may have the same care for one another. If one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if one member is honored, all rejoice together with it’ (1 Corinthians 12: 14, 24-26 NRSV).

What do you mean Population Development?

HB 5043, why do you divorce Development from the Church and the People, and address it only to an amorphous, disemboweled Population? The State’s citizens and the Church’s parishioners are one and the same, so it’s foolish to separate the Church from the State: you are treating each citizen as a split personality.

If you want to reduce the rate of population growth, that’s population underdevelopment, not development. Development can only be national development, and it must mean improvement of the well-being of every man, woman and child; each one must be healthy and productive, even educated formally or informally.

Since ‘Reproductive Health’ talks business, let’s talk about business management. Even if the ladies and gentlemen proponents of HB 5043 don’t put it this way, I can see ‘vision’ and ‘mission’ in the ‘Declaration of Policy’ (Section 2), although they call it instead ‘rationale.’ The Vision is the desired future. The Mission is easy enough to identify as it must be what is to be accomplished in order to achieve that vision. Given that, here is HB 5043 in management terms as I see it:

Vision: ‘Manageable population of healthy, educated and productive citizens.’ Excellent! I say.

Mission: ‘Responsible parenthood, informed choice, birth spacing and respect for life in conformity with internationally recognized human rights standards.’ Now, this remains to be seen, because, to be intelligent about it all, first we have to define all these terms; here they are, all referring to population:
manageable
healthy
educated
productive.

Those 4 are actually the goals in the Vision: manageability, health, education, and productivity of the population. Now, is each of those goals SMART, that is, Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-Bound?

No, sorry, HB 5043 does not define any of those terms that are all very crucial to the Vision. 5043 doesn’t say what it means by ‘manageable.’ It doesn’t tell us what method it will use to measure manageability. It doesn’t give us the list of criteria for measuring manageability. This is an unforgivable intellectual deficiency for a Congressional Bill that wants to advance itself into becoming National Policy.

And no, 5043 is not clear what it means by ‘healthy’ either, how it will be measured and, what’s more, how it can be maintained.

And no, 5043 does not tell us what it means to be ‘educated’ and how education is to be measured and achieved within what period of time, and how to tell if such education is relevant or not.

And yes, 5043 is silent on what is to be ‘productive’ and how it can be measured and achieved within what timeframe.

So, just as I don’t have to look through the whole pile down to the bottom of a big basketful of tomatoes to know that it’s rotten, I don’t have to look at the other sections of HB 5043 to know that it’s lousy.

My conclusion in this little study? House Bill 5043 reduces love to the sexual act. So, in that sense, here’s a song I dedicate to Lagman, Garin & Co (sung by Frank Sinatra, song by Cole Porter, 1930):

Love For Sale

Love for sale, appetizing young love for sale
Love that’s fresh and still unspoiled,
Love that’s only slightly soiled,
Love for sale.
Who will buy? Who would like to sample my supply?
Who’s prepared to pay the price, for a trip to Paradise?
Love for sale.
Let the poets pipe of love in their childish way;
I know every type of love, better far than they.
If you want the thrill of love, I’ve been through the mill of love;
Old love, new love, every love but true love.
Love for sale, appetizing young love for sale.
If you want to buy my wares, follow me and climb the stairs.
Love for sale.

In and out of HB 5043, all that talk might as well be of love of health, love of development, love of parenthood, love of informed choice, love of birth spacing. Every love but true love.Certainly not the love that 1 Corinthians 13 so beautifully speaks of. So you see, like me, if you happen to be a practicing Roman Catholic, you can’t support House Bill 5043. But if you happen to be a practical Roman Catholic, why are you still?! *

The Little People.

2008-11-27T13:36:00.000+08:00

Creative capitalism needs risk takers in science

If you were a Wall Street investor and a loser, what you had was paper money. Now the paper has run out; now you’re left holding the bag, no paper. You invested your future on a piece of paper, and now all you have is the future.

Wall Street has always been high risk, as high as the Trump Building at 40 Wall Street between William and Broad Streets - 282 meters, 72 floors. Wall Street is speculative, not creative capitalism.

Now, it’s time to invest more on the little people. Compared to Wall Street, the little people are hardly a risk. They are the greater number anyway, the multitude, remember? Out of the sweat of their brow we have been enjoying our food, clothing, shelter, and medicine, not to mention our luxuries. The little people are the creative workers. Take the creative risk, if not Christian risk, and you’ll be glad you did. Didn’t Jesus say? ‘Just as you did it to one of the least of my brothers, you did it to me.’ Matthew 25: 40 NRSV

I imagine that’s what Bill Gates was saying when he announced his theory & practice of ‘creative capitalism’ (see my ‘Bill Gates, Nobel Prize for Economics 2008!,’ this blog). That’s going against conventional wisdom. Creative capitalism is truly spreading the wealth to include those who have none, not concentrating it in Wall Street to people who already have everything. In other words, Bill Gates, bless his soul, was calling for New Risk Takers.

So, aside from Bill Gates, is anyone else interested in taking the risk with the little people? Alas, we have so few great historical examples in the last 100 years:

In California, yes, in 1906, when the Great Quake flattened rich and poor alike.
In Bangladesh, yes, in 1976, when economic theory said the practice was crazy.
In India, yes, today, while the US continues to think rich even in science.

On 18 April 1906, the Great San Francisco Quake reduced much of the city to debris. He knew exactly what to do. Amadeo Peter ‘AP’ Giannini sifted through the ruins of his bank, the Bank of Italy, loaded his wagon with some $2 million in gold, coins & securities, and went back home (Daniel Kadlec, 1998, time.com). Was he stealing it? He was stealing time. AP didn’t wait for the other banks planning to open in 1 month; in 6 days, he set up his new ‘bank,’ which was a wooden plank set on top of 2 barrels, and proceeded to extend loans ‘on a face and a signature’ to small businesses and small people to help them rebuild less their business and more their lives. He was banking on the little people.

He didn’t apply the old banker’s rule that I will lend you money only if you can show me you have money. In other words, he was not lending money; instead, he was giving out hope. Was his trust in the working class misguided? It wasn’t. AP’s bank grew and extended beyond San Francisco, had branches from coast to coast, and eventually became the Bank of America, which he had made into the largest bank in America at the time of his death in 1949. (It’s #2 today, behind Citigroup, $572 B vs $751 B.) AP is the only banker to make TIME Magazine’s ‘Builders & Titans of the 20th Century.’ He is my Working Class Hero!

Not only that. AP was not averse to risk when it came to the poor, but he was averse to riches. He is my Working Glass Hero! (I wear glasses when I work.) ‘I don’t want to be rich,’ he said. ‘No man actually owns a fortune; it owns him’ (quoted by ANN, 2008, entrepreneur.com). Personally, I have always been averse to the risk of rich. When I was that high in our village of Sanchez somewhere in Central Luzon, Philippines, I saw how miserly our neighbors-relatives were who were better off, and I thought that their wealth made them so, so I vowed never to become wealthy, including never to marry rich. And, to be frank and honest, I have kept that promise, even at the cost of breaking a heart -- mine.

AP also said, ‘I have worked without thinking of myself. This (is) the largest factor in whatever success I have attained’ (quoted by ANN as cited). One in a million soul.

In Bangladesh, another fellow, another rare hero has been working without thinking of himself. He is Muhammad Yunus.

In the mid-1970s, forgetting modern economics, Yunus wasn’t thinking of maximum profit at minimum service; he was thinking of maximum service at minimum profit. He was thinking small; he was thinking little people. He was a Professor at the Chittagong University in Bangladesh lecturing on economic theory when one day he decided to put into practice what he was not preaching: Lending money to those who had no visible means of paying it back. That is foolish. No, that is faith, ‘the evidence of things not seen, the substance of things hoped for’ (Hebrews 11: 1 KJV).

How small was it when Grameen started? $27 loaned out to 42 people, that is, it came to a little more than 60 cents to a borrower (Evaristus Mainsah et al, 2004, web.mit.edu). How small can you get? But Yunus had faith bigger than his heart; and the village borrowers of Bangladesh had hearts bigger than their heads – all of them surprised the economics professor by paying him back! That’s gratitude. From the little people.

That started the Grameen Bank, which was formally set up in 1983. ‘Grameen’ from ‘gram’ or village; Grameen was for the villagers, not the villagers’ leeches, the usurers. (We call them 5-6 in the Philippines, the 20 percenters, who collect everyday.) With Grameen, social pressure kept everyone honest. 23 years later, Muhammad Yunus and the Grameen Bank won the Nobel Peace Prize for 2006.

‘All people,’ Yunus told the graduates of MIT 06 June 2008, ‘are packed with unlimited potential (and carry) ‘a wonderful gift inside them. … Our challenge is to help unwrap their gift’ (David Chandler, web.mit.edu). He was asking the MIT graduates to create a new kind of businessman, a society-minded type. ‘You can change the world,’ he said. As he had. ‘When many little people take many little steps in many little places, they can change the world!’ – Barbara Rutting

Today, micro-credit is a multi-billion dollar industry in many countries. Now, what Grameen and its many copycats worldwide call micro-credit, I prefer to call little people-credit. Give credit to whom credit is due, people! It’s the little people that make it work, not the size of their credit. These are ‘minute sums, borrowed mainly by illiterate women, to set up the smallest imaginable enterprises’ and the success of Grameen illustrates the ‘bankability of the unbankable’ (Rosemary Righter, London Times, 31 October 1998). Grameen grants to women 95% of the loans (Mainsah et al as cited, 2004). Is this the bankability of women? Maybe. Rather, I think it’s community. It’s village. It’s the bankability of little people who don’t theorize but practice.

In India, members of Team ICRISAT both theorize and practice for the poor. ICRISAT is the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics based in Patancheru, Andhra Pradesh, India, a terrific science NPO (non-profit organization) headed by Director General William Dar, since 2000. ICRISAT, among the 15 international science centers under the support and advocacy of the CGIAR (Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research), has been rated Outstanding in overall institutional performance by the World Bank twice in a row, in 2006 and 2007. The World Bank supports the CGIAR.

Rated O for 2008? I wouldn’t be surprised. ICRISAT is creative for a science agency. Among this NPO’s many initiatives is what it calls the ABI (Agri-Business Incubator), which it has set up in its campus in Patancheru. Another winner. The ABI received the AABI Incubator of the Year Award for 2008 last 29 October in Seoul, Korea. The AABI is the Asian Association of Business Incubators; that was their 13th General Assembly meeting. Not many people recognize a winner when they see one.

ABI is not unlike Grameen, as it is also pro-poor and a risk taker. But this one is bigger business. This is essentially where capitalists meet the poor and with the support of the Government of India, donors and with ICRISAT technology, they incubate an entrepreneurial egg until it hatches and grows into a hen that lays all those proverbial golden eggs.

My favorite example of an ABI product is the sweet sorghum facility of Rusni Distilleries in the Medak District of Andhra Pradesh, which is now producing 40 kL (10.5 kgal) of ethanol every day from sweet sorghum and other feedstocks. Harvesting and processing the stalks provides about 40,000 man-days of labor per year at Rusni. Last year, 540 ha were planted to sweet sorghum and involved 791 farmers in Andhra Pradesh. A great beginning of a great industry.

Team ICRISAT is dead serious about sweet sorghum, and so am I, in case you haven’t noticed? And now the Team is developing a 5-year sweet sorghum R&D strategy. To help the fledgling sweet sorghum industry to develop, as far as I can discern from the senior staff discussions, with partners outside of ICRISAT, the Team plans to mainly:

(1) map out zones for cropping in Asia & Africa.
(2) breed sweet sorghum with higher & higher yields.
(3) improve cane processing to reduce losses after harvest.
(4) test syrup-making at the village level.
(5) test a 50-mile radius for farmers supplying cane to distilleries.

Those are the bare-bones essentials of the plan. I think it’s a good one.

But, you know, no longer young, now I’m an impatient old man, and I can’t wait that long. I want results today.

So, while members of Team ICRISAT work out the details of their new strategy to breed and select outstanding sweet sorghum varieties and help the farmers get the most from their labors, I believe Team ICRISAT and partners will do well also to map out a parallel strategy, what I shall refer to here as ‘The Village-Friendly Initiative.’ The basis of Village-Friendly is the well-known mantra: ‘Think globally, act locally.’

I remember last year, Team Captain William Dar and I were talking about the national rice trials that have been conducted in the Philippines probably for the last 50 years. Researchers test-plant promising rice hybrids in many locations, gather the data, and compute for the consistent highest yielder in all locations, select that and recommend it to everyone, and deselect the rest. That’s thinking global. We agreed that this needed a paradigm shift. A change we can all believe in. Crops are always location-specific; they perform best where they will, not everywhere. Plant breeders can telescope time if they compute for the highest yielder in each location instead and recommend that for that location. That’s acting local.

That is to say, you prescribe on-site what you have pre-tested on-site. For example: If you test-planted 26 varieties of sweet sorghum (SS1 to SS26) in 52 villages (V1 to V52) in 52 provinces in the Philippines, you will find, for instance, that SS1 is best in V15 and V36, SS13 in V2 only, SS18 in V25, V37, V38, V45, V51 and so on and so forth. So you recommend SS1 for V15 and V36 only, SS13 for V2 only, and SS18 for V25, V37, V38, V45, V51 only, because these are the village-specific, village-friendly varieties. In 1 year, you see, you have 26 outstanding varieties planted where they perform their level best. Max.

Applying that proposition, from out of the available sweet sorghum varieties and hybrids of ICRISAT, the highest yielders can be selected from those test-planted in the villages. (For Ilocos Norte, northern Philippines, you can ask VP for Planning & External Linkages Heraldo Layaoen of the Mariano Marcos State University; he has an ICRISAT-funded project on sweet sorghum, and he has been making trial plantings of several varieties for several years now.)

After that, you worry about processing and marketing. You always have to worry about processing and marketing, especially marketing. That’s where the little people usually get the littlest of the benefits from the sweat of their brows.

Meanwhile, the 2007 data from the ICRISAT-Rusni experience at Andhra Pradesh indicate that, ‘by and large, the crop performance was satisfactory under good soil and rainfall conditions and where the farmers adopted the recommended crop management practices,’ Captain of Team ICRISAT William Dar tells us. ‘We have data indicating greater scope for increased yields under farmers’ conditions, provided they manage their crops well and the rainfall is good.’

Noted. Yes, they have some familiar but unconquered territory to explore. This year, the best yield in scientists’ farms is 50% higher than the yield in farmers’ farms. That is to say, since ICRISAT scientists harvest 50 tons max while farmers harvest only 25 tons max, you have a yield gap between lab and field of 25 tons of green stalk yield per hectare. In this case, practice is 50% of theory. How do you improve that?

Not only that; based on the above info and data, the sweet sorghum Indian farmers who got 25 tons max did so given the following conditions:

(a) good soil
(b) good rainfall
(c) farmers following experts’ recommendations.

(a) Black is beautiful even in soils – they are more fertile. (b) Enough rains, because there is no irrigation facility. (c) The farmers have to follow recommendations in terms of crop care. The fact that many of them don’t is, again, as I see it, the question of not being able to ‘sell new knowledge,’ a question not merely of transfer of technology but of diffusion of technology. Upstream or downstream? The farmers have much to learn, and so do the scientists.

I believe the 3 givens are all crucial. I also believe that the 2nd is the most crucial of all. The Water Watcher thinks that this is so because the farmers can always build a good soil on their own whenever they decide to; they can always follow the experts’ advice anytime they wish; but the farmers can not control the rain even if they want to.

Or can they?

They can, actually, if they want to. Team ICRISAT’s research findings tell us how, and I have written about it (‘Water Lessons of Adarsha,’ this blog). When the rain comes, harvest the water – and you control the rain. The experience of the poor farmers of Adarsha tells us that you have to invest in the water, in this instance the rain.

So I hope that some new NPO partners of Team ICRISAT will be taking newer and more risks investing in water. I hope that in the ABI at the ICRISAT campus in Patancheru, they can convince (or convene) another village-friendly bank to invest in poor sweet sorghum farmers who own only their faces and their signatures and need to invest their energies in water for their farms and homes in the villages. Liquid Green Grameen, I shall call it. When they succeed, and I have no doubt they will, like the Grameen Bank of Muhammad Yunus, Liquid Green Grameen will become a model for many a developing country in Asia and Africa. Even if they don’t win a Nobel Prize for Peace, they will have already won the hearts of the little people who number in the billions. *

Light & Black & Color.

2008-11-23T11:53:00.000+08:00

Can photography be simplified?

About 40 years ago, I read in a photography magazine or book; I don’t remember the publication but I remember the lesson: Photography is but light and shadow. I was already enamored with the technology of the SLR at that time. Single-lens reflex camera. I was also enamored with the sound of the shutter while the camera is taking a shot: Ka-chak! I still am.

In the marvelous TV series CSI, Vegas or Miami or New York, they are still using the old SLRs, not digital cameras. You wonder why? Ownership of one of the manual SLRs (Hasselblad, Leica, Nikon, Asahi Pentax) was a status symbol up at to the 1990s. Today, you look absolutely sexy, whether male or female, holding one of those big cameras and clicking. There’s drama in the bigness and sound of the camera because the camera has always been associated with high quality.

In 1975, I became Chief Information Officer (not the title) of FORI (Forest Research Institute) in Los Baños and we had a monthly newsletter (Canopy), a quarterly technical journal (Sylvatrop) and a quarterly color magazine (Habitat) that all required photographs and all sorts of images. All those publications I founded and edited and wrote for and shot for. The still camera was what we had; Asahi Pentax was what we had at the office (we could rent a Nikon once in a while), with all those lenses: close-up, telephoto, wide-angle, normal; and all those filters (UV, close-up; my favorite was the polarizing filter). I read on photography on my own and two of the early lessons I have never forgotten were: (1) The best time to shoot is the early hours of the day, when the colors are soft and the air is clean. A lesson from the User’s Manual most probably. (2) Bracketing: Always take insurance shots, at least 2 extra shots, one with a different opening, another with a different speed. A lesson from National Geographic.

I remember Mao Chanco himself, Editor of Orient, gave us one embarrassing lesson for which I thanked him. I became a friend when we found out we had the same interests, such as writing and photography and appropriate technology. Small is beautiful, remember? Ernest F Schumacher, after whom I named one of my sons. When I told Mao we were taking insurance shots and varying our openings and speeds, he admonished us that we were in fact wasting film, because what we had was essentially the same shot. His advice? ‘Same scene, different angles.’ Right! We were not so intelligent. (I’ve written about this in ‘My Digital World,’ frankahilario.blogspot.com,)

I also asked questions from the boys, but especially from Pat Laforteza, who had gone to Germany just to study photography. (I forgot under which scholarship it was.) He knew all the parts of the camera and could dismantle and bring all those parts together again; he knew how to take good care of cameras and accessories; he knew all about lighting; he would go to great lengths to get the right lighting of a scene. No, he didn’t exactly say so, but he didn’t like shadows. I always went for shadows. I never liked scenes that were set up, or posed. Especially firing-squad shots. I always liked candid shots, un-posed.

24 October this year, early morning, at home, I saw the rising sun peeking through the open glass jalousie and striking the backrest of my black executive chair at an angle (it’s not leather). It reminded me of that lesson of long ago. So I took this shot.

I did not edit the image; it’s exactly as I took it, except that I cropped the original and reduced the resolution from 2816 x 2112 pixels to 1696 x 1696 pixels. The background is the wall of the room where I’m holed in; this is the chair I use when I’m employed with the desktop PC, which is most of the time, at least 10 hours a day. I write essays for my blogs, and I need photographs; I have to rely on my own shots.

I now have my own digital camera, a Canon PowerShot A540 shooting at 6 megapixels. And yes, I do consider my Canon a God-send: It sets the aperture for me, the speed, the lighting. It never runs out of film – there is no film. I use a 2 GB memory card so I can take hundreds of photographs, or until my fingers hurt, in 1 outing. All I bring are extra pairs of AA batteries, industrial-strength. I don’t delete any shot. On my PC, I can have a slideshow of all the images and enjoy watching them or watch and select which one to use in my blog post. I can print out my own ‘contact’ prints with my Epson Stylus TX100, or print bigger and more beautiful photos.

What’s that? Photography Simplified.

The Fall of Santa Catalina.

2008-11-20T05:41:00.000+08:00

When Obama comes, can Spring be far behind?

Spring? Very far from my mind when I think of Barack Obama, the next President of the United States. I’m in tropical Manila, of course, in the Philippines, 13,700 km away from Washington DC. Today, nevertheless, when I think of Barack Obama, I think of The Autumn, The Fall.

Surreal. That’s what the up-and-coming presidency of Obama is to me. I’ve been reading Google News and watching Fox much; I have come rather to think Obama is a change you can believe in, but too much of a change for the United States of America. And so is another up-and-coming USA event: an economic recession and an economic slowdown. In a recession or slowdown, nobody wins.

In the Philippines, 18 November, afternoon, we make sure everybody wins. In a birthday party, to encourage the young boys to learn to play tennis well and become champions each in his own time (like Obama maybe), we arrange for a round-robin competition and we pass the hat for the cash prizes: Pesos 400, 300 and 200 for the 3 winners, 160 and 150 for the 2 losers. Since I contribute 150, it means I contribute to the losers’ loser. I say you have to reward for trying.

The birthday party I am attending is for a good old friend, Namor Alapgan, 69, celebrated on a tennis court in the town of Santa Catalina in the province of San Manuel in my beloved country, where up the hills with a commanding view of the Sea of Santa Isabel, there sits the heavenly subdivision called Parklands. They are all tennis players except me. And in that party, Simon tells his important if sad story of a devastating landslide and flashflood that happened in Santa Catalina in 2006. Simon says the blame is on Parklands. Simon is a little intoxicated; I don’t drink, but I’m a good listener. It happened 2 years ago. Surreal now. (Note: To protect both the innocent and the guilty, the age is right but none in this paragraph is a real name).

Still so real to me. Really, they have the same cause. An economic recession or slowdown is caused by overuse and abuse of resources. The same is true with a landslide and a flashflood. Everybody loses.

On 28 September 2006, the super storm locally called Milenyo (internationally known as Xangsane, which means elephant in Laos) visited the Philippines and wrought havoc in Santa Catalina, among other places. The heavens poured water relentlessly; the winds blew their mightiest; and in Parklands, the earth soaked, landslided, and drowned the villages below. While not many people died, many lives were devastated – structures swept away, sources of livelihood lost, a vital bridge collapsed, the whole town inundated not only with water but filth neither fit for homes nor gardens nor animals. This is what I call the Fall of Santa Catalina. Will it happen again?

On the same storm, IRRI (the International Rice Research Institute) reported on the damage to itself, the rest of Los Baños and Bay: ‘more than 16,000 homes affected’ (‘Typhoon blasts rice research institute’ (October 2006, irri.org/media/press). There were wind gusts of 160 kph and some 112 mm of rain that poured (IRRI did not say if for 1 day only).

I reported on Milenyo myself; see my ‘Xangsane & The Legendary Mount Makiling,’ October 2006, frankahilario.wordpress.com). To quote me:

Others in Los Baños, Laguna had sad stories to tell. At least two sides of Mount Makiling came crashing down, trees and rocks and mud crushing houses and people and livestock.

I quoted Ms Portia Lapitan, Director of the Makiling Center for Mountain Ecosystems, a unit of the College of Forestry and Natural Resources of the University of the Philippines Los Baños, as saying that the rainfall was 308 mm, 15 times the average of 20 mm. Her explanation of the crashing down of the mountain was the deluge, the ‘abnormal volume of water and the intensity of the wind brought by the typhoon.’

So we go back to the Santa Catalina landslide and flashflood: Were they caused also by a slightly smaller deluge, 5 times the average of 20 mm (112 mm)? No, I don’t think so. Even the Mt Makiling landslide was not caused by the deluge – the deluge was all over that extinct volcano but the whole mountain didn’t come crashing down. In fact, it was only the village called Bagong Silang that landslided – the residents had been loosening the soil on the slopes, inappropriately applying lowland agriculture techniques to upland soil, cutting forest trees, cultivating farm crops, inviting disaster. Have I seen them do it? If you’ve seen one slash-and-burn farmer, you’ve seen them all.

Same story in the Fall of Santa Catalina: While the super storm was all over town, only the villages directly in the path of the landslide received the deluge of water and mud. This means that it was not too much rain coming down on short notice: it was too much soil. Soil erosion, which graduates into a landslide, is an erosion of knowledge.

Same story with economic recession and slowdown.

What’s the difference? Our Secretary of Finance Gary Teves says, ‘What you mean by economic slowdown is when your neighbor loses his job. By recession, it’s you who loses the job’ (Leo Reyes, 18 November, groundreport.com/Business). When the small businesses go, it’s a slowdown. When the big businesses go, it’s a meltdown.

Now my double metaphor: The landslide is the economic recession, the flood is the slowdown.

Both the economic recession and the earthly landslide are man-made; so are the economic slowdown and flashflood.

John McCain (my hero!) said it was ‘the old-boy network and Washington corruption’ that created the Wall Street crisis (Rick Klein, 16 September, abcnews.go.com). Corporate greed will sooner or later do your corporate body in. Keep up the good works and you're a good bet.

On one hand, I can blame the Fall of Santa Catalina on the Parklands people. In developing that plush subdivision, they may have disturbed the soil much it went down the hills when the deluge of rainwater came. You may have all the trees there but if you disturb or change the ground cover, the vegetation that has been keeping the soil intact, the plant roots mechanically holding the soil particles together, then you are exposing the whole place to erosion and, worse, landslide. That’s what happened in Bagong Silang. The disaster of Mt Makiling tells us that trees can only hold so much soil (and themselves) for so much time.

On the other hand, the blame may not be on Parklands at all. I went to many a village in Santa Catalina when I was helping ‘sell’ someone running for Mayor in the late 1990s, and I did not see enough trees on the hills to make the conservationist in me happy. Instead, I saw too many patches of bare soil. It is not right to put the blame on the Parklands people only for the landslide and the flashflood of 2006; I feel I must blame the Santa Catalina people also, if not much more, for the neglect of their hills, for not recognizing that if you do not maintain the ground cover of any soil, you are exposing it to erosion by rainwater anytime. Bare is exposed; a torrent of water will rape a bare soil – it’s a natural law.

I must also blame UP Los Baños, whose mandate is national, for the neglect of their extension, for not helping out the many Municipal Agriculturists and the 1 Provincial Agriculturist in the province of San Manuel in promoting the virtue / value of ground / soil cover. We cannot mistake the trees for the forest, to the neglect of the vegetation below the canopy of those trees, to the neglect of the organic matter that binds the soil particles together so that they become (almost) impossible to erode.

After the February 2006 landslide in Southern Leyte, Philippines, the province received through the ADB (Asian Development Bank) a grant of $3 million from the Japan Fund for Poverty Reduction (December 2006, adb.org/media). This was to be expended to repair roads, upgrade facilities and services of hospitals, and construct additional classrooms. The Leyte Landslide had dislocated 5,700 families, damaged 35 km of roads, and destroyed or imperiled 20 school buildings. The amount would also finance the establishment of the Provincial Disaster Management Center, and to ‘provide training and equipment for search & rescue operations.’

Thanks, ADB! But I notice that the emphasis is disaster management and not disaster prevention. So, I’m not surprised by this news: ‘Leyte landslide site still hazardous 2 years (later) – scientist’ (30 April 2008, Vicente Labro, inquirer.net/specialfeatures). But I’m surprised that in that same news item, Sandra Catane of the National Institute of Geological Sciences of the University of the Philippines Diliman, after an international expert group determined that the area is still hazardous, says ‘We need to do something (to reduce the impact of landslides).’ To reduce the impact but not to reduce the occurrence of landslides? An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Elementary, my dear Sandra.

A little more than a month ago, on 15 October 2008, it was reported that another landslide occurred at the village of Guadalupe in Cebu City. As in the first incident on 14 April, the landslide covered 8 houses with thick mud and limestone; 12 families had to be temporarily relocated. Landco Pacific Corp, a Guadalupe developer, had constructed 8 water detention ponds to prevent flooding downstream, but City Councilor Gerard Carillo said ‘these were not constructed properly and could not catch the water coming from the upland areas’ (Linette C Ramos & Rene H Martel, sunstar.com.ph).

That little news item is very revealing to me: ‘could not catch the water coming from the upland areas’ – these words did not actually come from Carillo; I put them in quotes because they did not come from me either – they are the reporters’. The point is this: The water directly causing the landslide came from up the hills. This means that those hills are, among other things, devoid of vegetative or ground cover that can absorb the rainwater and keep it in place; the place is no longer functioning as a watershed. While those water detention ponds are important, it is more important that the watershed be reestablished. To put it simply, where the forest is gone, the forest must be restored – and fast.

First things first. If your hills are forested, you have a good watershed; otherwise, you have a bad watershed – and during the rainy season, you can expect soil erosion often and a landslide anytime. The best water detention pond is the watershed itself, the forested land. A good watershed soaks up a torrent of rainwater and releases the water not as a flash flood but gently, gradually. Here where the trees stand, only the water falls, not the soil.

There are natural landslides, but there are more landslides arising from clearcut forests and their roads; a 25-year scientific study has proven that ‘clearcutting causes very large increases in landslides’ (Pacific Rivers Council, December 1996, umpqua-watersheds.org). That’s in Oregon, in the USA, but it might as well as be in the Philippines.

Tropical or temperate, the forest is the watershed. Deforestation and bad agricultural practices result in ‘excessive soil loss and uncontrolled water runoff during and after rainstorms’ (Brian James, slumaffe.org). I know. I’ve seen it myself. When I was the Chief Information Officer of FORI (Forest Research Institute), 1975-1981, I visited, climbed and documented many a forested area and slash-and-burn plot in the Philippines: in Luzon, the Visayas, and Mindanao. I could see the undergrowth heavily damaged and the forest soil exposed by the dragging of the huge logs from here to there, from the top of the hill down to the stream below. So, it is easy for me to say that in the Philippines, distinguishing the trigger from the cause, the landslides of Santa Catalina, Southern Leyte, Mt Makiling and Guadalupe were all triggered by heavy rains and caused by different levels of degradation of watersheds. After a point, the level is not important – the degradation is.

The loss of the forest – that is to say, the fall of trees along with the baring of the soil – brings about the rise of floodwaters coming from the hills and flowing to the valley below. Will the Fall of Santa Catalina happen again? Not if they learn the watershed lesson that is also a tennis lesson that is also an economic lesson: Keep it up, and it won’t come crashing down on you. *

Look at cool Looc guys celebrating

2008-11-19T12:51:00.000+08:00

Happy Birthday, Roman Romeo Nagpala!

18 November 2008. Your age is a great number, 69, and very significant, very meaningful, and very graphic. Here are some of your friends celebrating - you can't see me because I'm the one shooting all you guys. Later, when we meet again, you can identify the faces and I'll type in the names. The sinigang sa hipon was great. The broiled tilapia was great. The skin of the lechon was great - at first. The evening was great. Actually, I took about 150 shots.

Where’s the water?

2008-11-17T17:36:00.000+08:00

NASA, where's the life?

NASA of the US: We have found ‘evidence of a wetter Mars’ (28 October 2008, upi.com). Drylands of the world: We don’t want evidence of the existence of water once upon a time; we want the water now!

On second thought, we can learn from what the NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) has learned.

NASA: ‘Water most likely flowed in the distant past on Mars, carving channels and other features clearly visible on its surface. But other than in the form of clouds and ice, liquid water cannot exist on the planet’s surface today, thanks to the thinness of its atmosphere’ (2000, Andrew Bridges, space.com). Frankenstein: As far as I’m concerned, Mars is dead.

In last month’s report, NASA had observed hydrated silica, or opal, ‘spread across large regions of Mars. That, scientists said, suggests liquid water was on the planet’s surface as recently as 2 billion years ago’ (upi.com).

I said dead. Water was there 2 billion years ago. Not today. The fate of Planet Mars is going to be the fate of Planet Earth if we don’t watch where the water is going! And if the atmosphere in Planet Earth remains hostile to any life form other than our own egoistic selves.

From the science of exploring the universe out there, let us turn to the science of understanding this world right here. On 03 November 2008, in a scientific meeting at Istanbul, Turkey, in his Introductory Statement as Chair of the CST (Committee on Science and Technology) of the UNCCD (United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification), William Dar says:

We must continually remind ourselves of how important our task is. We live on a precious planet that hosts abundant, diverse and intelligent life that is unique in the universe. If we fail, the consequences are disastrous. We must use science to become better stewards of our precious inheritance.

Dar is Director General of ICRISAT (International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics). The CST is meeting 3-14 November at Istanbul in its First Special Session.

Here, I am going to reduce that ‘precious inheritance’ Dar is talking about to only one thing: Water. NASA, if you’re looking for intelligent life, you might as well start with Planet Earth.

UN Secretary General Kofi Annan says on 22 March 2005 in a video message: ‘We need to increase water efficiency, especially in agriculture.’ In agriculture, from high school 50 years ago, I came to know we are The Water Wasters (see my ‘The Water People,’ in this same blog).

Since my dear Philippines is agricultural and remains largely non-industrial, I’m interested in the science of crops; and since I’m an Ilocano and can trace my roots from the North (Rosario, La Union), I’m interested in the drylands. And since I’m a science writer, I’m interested in how the drylands can become more fertile and productive. Water is a good start. How can we be intelligent with water?

Be careful when you say ‘water efficiency’ – for instance, if you say ‘irrigation facilities for rice improved water efficiency in Central Luzon,’ that is misleading, to say the least; what you really mean is that the facilities improved water availability. Water facilities don’t improve efficiency by themselves – it’s the rice farmers who use water who do. Or not.

I’m concerned because on 26 August 2008, I decided to focus my writing on the intelligent use of water. I thought, ‘Water is food, is health, is life.’ Along this line, in 1998, in reasoning out the Mars probes, NASA asked (mars.jpl.nasa.gov): ‘What caused the change in Mars’ climate? Were the conditions necessary for life to originate ever present on Mars? Could there be bacteria in the subsurface alive today? These are the questions that lead us to explore Mars.’ In the last part of that paragraph, NASA asked, ‘ What are the minimal conditions necessary for the formation of life?’

Plural in number. NASA did not have to go to Mars and spend billions of dollars of American taxpayers’ money to answer that question. I could have rephrased that question into the singular and asked, ‘What is the minimal condition necessary for the formation of life, and the continuance of it?’ And I could have answered with only 1 simple word: ‘Water.’ You can have all the minerals in the world, as probably Mars has, but if you don’t have water, you don’t have life. ‘Where’s the water in Mars?’ is not the question; ‘Where’s the water?’ is the question.

Alternatively I could have opened my NRSV (New Revised Standard Version) Bible to NASA and showed them Genesis 1:1-2 that speaks of when God created the universe:

In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a mighty wind swept over the face of the waters.

Whether in Evolution or in Intelligent Design, water was there at the beginning. I’m a Roman Catholic and I believe my NRSV. On the sixth day, God created Man, that is, He created water first. Water was right there in the very beginning. It’s not the economy, stupid; even science will tell you it’s the water that gives you life.

Even the ancient Egyptians will tell you. Why were the pyramids built dry? Why are the mummies dry? The Pharaohs didn’t want their bodies to waste away. It’s the water that gives life to the fungi and bacteria and worms of decay.

NASA, if you were looking for signs of life, you didn’t have to go out of this world.

But, NASA, if you were looking for signs of intelligent life, you would have had a problem there. Up to now, we humans have not shown much intelligence when it comes to, say, water. Because we don’t recognize it as the continuing source of our continuing life, we treat it as just another resource that we can be prodigal with.

In 2003, Unesco came up with Water for People, Water for Life (subtitle: The United Nations World Water Development Report), where the main & introductory illustration for Chapter 1, ‘The World’s Water Crisis,’ is a young black girl who is a seller of wares, who carries on her head plastic containers of all kinds. Illustrations are very, very important to me in the sense of Marshall McLuhan’s ‘the medium is the message,’ that’s why I now take my own photographs; and the silent message I get from the Unesco image is that ‘the container is the thing’ and not the substance abuse or misuse. Caveat communicator!

In that Introductory Statement I have cited, Chair of the CST William Dar also says, ‘The new 10-Year Strategic Plan and Framework to Enhance the Implementation of the Convention is our roadmap for change.’ Change we must all believe in. Of that plan, he quotes the COP (Conference of Parties) for the UNCCD as saying that ‘Operational Objective 3 on science, technology and knowledge is a central component of the strategic plan. The CST is given primary responsibility to fulfill this objective.’ The COP is the supreme governing body of the UNCCD. The UNCCD has newly adopted the RBM (results-based management) approach in its operations, so it’s interested in outcomes. According to C Buentjen of the ADB (adb.org), RBM is 40 years old and this approach came from the private sector. The UNCCD came to life 17 June 1994 (unccd.int); the news tells us at least the 44-year old UNCCD is not averse to change.

In the 10-year UNCCD plan itself (unccd.int/cop), I find that (Operational) Outcome 3.5 interests me greatly:

Effective knowledge-sharing systems, including traditional knowledge, are in place at the global, regional subregional and national levels to support policymakers and end-users, including through the identification and sharing of best practices and success stories.

Expected result: Scientific knowledge shared. I could write a book about how as matters stand today in the Internet world, not to mention the print world, in science much of the knowledge open for sharing do not because they cannot support policymakers and end-users – for the simple reason that they are written in technical language that only the scientists themselves understand. Hardly any policymaker or end-user of knowledge speaks the language that scientists and their advocates prefer in their publications and webpages, websites. Science must translate itself to Everyman’s language if it doesn’t want to remain irrelevant. Now therefore, Team CST has its job cut out for it.

As a writer, I don’t want to remain irrelevant. That is one reason why I’m glad I found my way writing science the way I now write, much of it I owe the Reader’s Digest. You can say that I dig for the information, digest it, and share with you the insight. You don’t have to agree with me, but you can see I’m passionate about it all. I certainly inform you, often make you think other things, or otherwise, or make you laugh. ‘Live well, laugh often, love much’ – I say with Bessie Anderson Stanley (1904).

Ah, but if I know William Dollente Dar by now, after I have done some information search and authored a book (Team ICRISAT Champions the Poor; see 17 December 2007, ‘My American Book,’ americanchronicle.com), and come out with many essays after that about him and Team ICRISAT for the last 16 months, since June 2007, with his quiet smarts, I can be sure Dar’s Team CST will come out champions.

By now, the way I look at it, having been Team Captain of ICRISAT for the last 8 years, William Dar is in his element: Water. Simple. ICRISAT has twice been rated Outstanding by the World Bank among 15 international research centers allied under the CGIAR (Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research). The World Bank supports CGIAR; the 2 ICRISAT Rated O awards were for Total-System or Team performances in 2006 and 2007. You will note that ICRISAT works in the semi-arid tropics (it’s part of the name, in case you didn’t notice), and it is based in India, a big water-challenged country – all that means that its 5 mandate crops (chickpea, peanut, pearl millet, pigeonpea, sorghum) must not only survive but improve with very little water in the soil. That’s one of the reasons Team ICRISAT calls its new, improved varieties smart crops (see my ‘The Smart Revolution,’ frankahilario.blogspot.com).

William Dar is an Ilocano, from Santa Maria, Ilocos Sur, from the drylands of the Ilocos Region, northern Philippines, so he knows the value of water, or lack of it. ICRISAT has regional offices in Africa, projects also in Asia. In the drylands of Africa and Asia, of course they know the value of water, which is like that of a pearl of great price – people usually value what they lack. Those who have, do they know how to make the best use of water? A few. It is the vast majority, the multitude who must learn the many ways to use even inadequate water intelligently.

In his remarks I have already cited, Dar mentions one of the welcome news in the science of water: The formation of the DSD (Dryland Science for Development) consortium composed of 5 international institutions of renown: the European DesertNet, ICARDA (International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas), the JRC/IES (Joint Research Centre / Institute for Environment and Sustainability of the European Commission), the UNU-INWEH (United Nations’ University’s International Network on Water, Environment and Health), and ICRISAT. Dryland science for development? Actually, the DSD is the working team of the CST in preparing and raising funds for the 1st scientific conference on drylands to be held at the end of 2009. On Earth, not on Mars.

All that, of course, proceeds from the premise that, Dar says, ‘science has a critical role to play in the sustainability of the world we live in, and the quality of life that we enjoy.’ He qualifies that and says, ‘The critical challenge before us today is to improve the interface between science and policy so that the right steps are taken that will bring us back from the edge of the abyss.’

Interface?

‘The world is watching us,’ Dar says. I hope not. I hope the world is not just watching. We have too many watchers and too few doers.

‘The world is watching us, and will judge us by the decisions and actions that we take here in Istanbul.’ That’s the problem with the world, always watching others and judging them. Just watching. When will the world stop watching and start taking action for the good?

‘Our planet is not ours to destroy,’ Dar says. ‘We hold it in trust for future generations. Will we live up to that trust?’

The interface of science and political will. Science will do its part, I have no doubt about that. I’m not so sure about political will. *