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“One DA” Champions The Poor!

Today Saturday, 10 April 2021, Manila PH: “Happy Birthday, Sir William Dar, Secretary of Agriculture! We wish you more happy birthdays to come!”

Mr Dar was Director General (DG) 2000 to 2014 of the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT), which is based in India. 15 years – the Indians had so much faith in him as science leader, so why not us Filipinos?

Know that when Mr Dar became DG of ICRISAT, the institute belonged to the bottom of the list (kulelat) among 15 international agricultural research centers under CGIAR (Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research), including IRRI. When Mr Dar retired in December 2014, ICRISAT was already #1, having won many awards and increased its budget over the years. The Secret? Team ICRISAT. The Spirit behind? Mr Dar as Servant Leader.

I know all that because I was international consulting writer (WFH) from 2007 to 2014, maintaining the blog iCRiSAT Watch (Blogspot.com), publishing a total of 365 long essays, 1,000 words plus each; out of those articles, ICRISAT published 7 books with me as Author.

My very first ICRISAT book was titled Team ICRISAT Champions The Poor (162 pages, 8.5”x11”), my title. On page 3, I wrote:

I came to know William Dar, Director General of the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT), through a common friend, Santiago Obien, former Director of the Philippine Rice Research Institute (PhilRice) who made PhilRice world-renown, who asked me if I could write about Dar just as I had written about him (“Management: Relating Is Everything. Or, The Wizard Of Rice Who Cultivated Minds,” 2006 July 31, americanchronicle.com). I said I couldn’t possibly write about him until we met and I could ask pertinent questions, meaning size him up. And so we did, and so I did. And so I wrote, a little tentatively, about sweet sorghum and IICRISAT (“The Yankee Dawdle. On Discovery Sorghum, The Great Climate Crop,” 2007 February 4, americanchronicle.com), then mostly about William Dar himself (“An Inconvenient Truth: William Dar, The Filipino As Global Manager,” 2007 February 26, americanchronicle.com). The rest is his story.

The title of my first ICRISAT book today we can convert into “One DA Champions The Poor” –  we have “Team DA.” The man behind the international success of ICRISAT is the same man who champions the poor farmers and fishers in the Philippines today. Personally, he knows how it is to be poor – in Ilocos Sur, his parents could not afford to send him to high school! (His uncle did.) He studied at Benguet State University (BSA major in Education; MS Agronomy), and UP Los Baños (PhD in Horticulture).

He was the founding Director of the Bureau of Agricultural Research (BAR). When he became Executive Director of the Philippine Council for Agriculture & Resources Research & Development (PCARRD), he introduced the concept of Farmer-Scientist working in tandem, the practice of which brought Romulo Davide a Magsaysay Award.

Today, with Mr Dar as thinking head of DA, many a Filipino farmer and fisher can hope for much better lives. Asa Ka Pa!@517

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