My 2024 Wish List Includes PH Pres BBM Paying Very Good Attention To William Dar’s Wish List For PH Agriculture

“Business as usual” is no longer the appropriate attitude for PH agriculture – says former Secretary of Agriculture William Dar in his Manila Times column: “My Wish List For 2024” (04 Jan 2023, manilatimes.net). “As the 2024 unfolds, let us be more conscious of the need to make the local and global food system more efficient, productive, and sustainable, especially with the three Cs still having an effect on agriculture.” 
(“Wish List” from depositphotos.com,

And the three C's are, according to Mr Dar: Covid-19, Climate Change, and geopolitical Conflicts. “If we still insist on that [“business as usual”] approach, we will surely see a drastic decline in food production in the near future, and more people driven to poverty, or worse, hunger.”

Mr Dar says:

And here is my wish list for the country’s agri-fishery industry for 2024 that is also comprised of solutions that will have an impact beyond this year: Regenerative farming practices become mainstream in Philippine agriculture; more farmers and agribusiness companies adopt digitalization; Philippine agricultural exports will recover and expand; more farm clustering including cooperatives development will be undertaken; rice self-sufficiency level will increase.

I emphasize this, from Mr Dar’s Wish List: “Regenerative farming practices become mainstream in Philippine agriculture; more farmers and agribusiness companies adopt digitalization; Philippine agricultural exports will recover and expand; more farm clustering including cooperatives development will be undertaken; rice self-sufficiency level will increase.”

For Mr Dar’s Wish List to become reality, I note as an agriculturist  – “Regenerative farming practices” – Regenerative Agriculture (RA). I myself cannot emphasize RA enough,

If you ask me, in short, Regenerative Agriculture will solve Farmer Poverty and help resolve Climate Change. The Filipino farmers’ current general practice is Chemical Agriculture (CA), with its (unacknowledged) double damage: (1) CA is uneconomic, as it requires high cost & high results with low returns; (2) CA generates greenhouse gases that in turn generate Climate Change! Thus, inadvertently, the farmers are their own worst double enemies!

Being regenerative, Mr Dar says, “We must start now!”

He says:

Regenerative agriculture’s main objective is to make growing crops more harmonized with nature and the ecosystem, and to lessen or eliminate its contribution to greenhouse gas emissions.

Why insist on regenerative farming? He says:

The possibilities can be endless for regenerative agriculture, and the overall objective is to make food production less harmful to the environment, sustainable and efficient over the long term.

I must not forget to mention Mr Dar’s wish for agricultural digitalization, as “this can be applied over numerous aspects of agriculture, from improving food production to marketing produce, which ultimately benefit consumers.”

My own digitalization wish list for my country’s agriculture is that for the creation of what I call a “Learning Bank” (LB) for agriculture, essentially based on what Mr Dar proposed 23 years ago: “Open Academy for Philippine Agriculture” (OpAPA). My version today is for an Internet-based Learning Bank that is open & understandable by even senior high school students. This LB will be science-based, naturally.@517