Wanted! Knowledge Bank For Anyone To Find Learning Scattered In Agriculture, And Teach Yourself Who, What, Where, When & How

If you care enough about knowledge in agriculture as applied in the Philippines – or elsewhere in Asia – you should find lessons in the book by Cielito F Habito, PhD (Doc Ciel), “No Free Lunch (Economics In Bite-Sized Pieces)”, now out (shop.inquirer.com.ph). Essentially an agriculturist, I have enjoyed reading it and been mentally enriched. Agree or not, you will learn more if you have an open mind.

In the chapters “Dar’s Paradigm Shift (August 9, 2019)” and “Managing Agriculture (August 13, 2019),” Doc Ciel says about his conversation with my favorite Secretary of Agriculture William Dar:

Our recommendation was to get away from DA’s persistent top-down management approach in favor of province-led devolution, based on the sound governance principle of subsidiarity: let the unit of government closest to… the problems on the ground be the ones to identify and implement the solutions. But the [Agriculture] Secretary flatly rejected this, actually wanting to recentralize farm extension…

As a self-styled “The Editor In Chief” (see title of my blog), I especially note: Mr Dar “actually wanting to recentralize farm extension” – and such “strong desire” gladdens me 100%!

Nota bene: We have the Provincial Agriculture Officer (PAO) and Municipal Agricultural Officer (MAO) assigned to the territorial local government units (LGUs) – now, where are the PAOs and the MAOs getting their extension materials and messages? Neither from the provinces nor the municipalities, surely.

I don’t know if Mr Dar mentioned to Doc Ciel in their conversation about a Knowledge Bank or Learning Center. When Mr Dar was still Director General (DG) of the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) based in India (where he was DG for 3 terms or 15 years), he submitted to PH agriculture offices, via the Philippine Rice Research Institute (PhilRice), his proposal for an “Open Academy For Philippine Agriculture” (OpAPA), in 2001. I happened to be a media consultant for PhilRice at that time, and OpAPA encouraged me much as an educator (UP Los Baños BS Ag Edu, 1965), and digital denizen, since 1991. Thus, I was inspired to brainstorm by myself to build OpAPA from scratch and produce the digital book “The Geography Of Knowledge” (TGoK, 198 pages), a digital copy of which I submitted to PhilRice c/o Roger Barroga, Information head of PhilRice, to help OpAPA come to reality and serve the digital users whether or not they were acquainted with technical terms in agriculture.

Some 21 years ago, TGoK was a revolutionary concept entirely out of my head – Mr Dar’s OpAPA did not come with instructions on how to build it – TGoK showed how the digital library for everyone could be constructed. A 4^th year high school student could then access the TGoK-based OpAPA because the Knowledge Bank is presented in both technical and non-technical terms – a revolutionary idea in itself (no, I did not copy the idea from anywhere or anybody, being a product of brainstorming by myself).

The LGUs cannot build such a Knowledge Bank in agriculture by themselves!@517