2 Surprises For The Day: 1st, “Happy Father’s Day! Jose Rizal, Father Of PH Agribusiness” (1892). 2nd, “Happy Father’s Day! William Dar, Father of The New Thinking For Agriculture” (2019)
Rizal was exiled to Dapitan in July 1892 (Wikipedia, en.wikipedia.org). Rohaiza Vejano says (15 Feb 2019, “Jose Rizal As A Businessman, Prezl, prezi.com):
Rizal engaged in business. In partnership with Ramon Carreon, a Dapitan merchant, he made profitable business ventures in fishing, copra, and hemp industries. He invited his relatives to come to Mindanao, for there “is vast and ample field of business” in the island. He particularly told Saturnina that in Dapitan she could profitably engage in the textile, jewelry, and hemp business.
Rizal wrote to his Austrian friend Ferdinand Blumentritt about his life in Dapitan; here is from a letter quoted by Gerardo P Sicat (23 June 2021, “Rizal’s Entrepreneurial Life As Exile In Dapitan,” PhilStar Global, philstar.com):
To… help the local people here a little, I have turned merchant. I buy hemp and ship it to Manila. I was lucky this month; I made $200 at one blow….
This same Father’s Day, I also greet the current PH Secretary of Agriculture: “Happy Father’s Day! William Dar, Father of ‘The New Thinking For Agriculture’ of the Philippines.”
Never in the history of the Philippines did any Secretary of Agriculture come up with such a believing, thinking & acting Bible as Mr Dar. The New Thinking (TNT) was packaged with “8 paradigms” – Explosive! A paradigm is “a set of assumptions, concepts, values, and practices that constitute a way of viewing reality for the community that shares them, especially in an intellectual discipline” (American Heritage Dictionary, thefreedictionary.com); “a standard, perspective, or set of ideas” (Vocabulary.com, vocabulary.com).
On 13 June 2019, in his Manila Times column (manilatimes.net), where he first announced TNT, he said (with my paragraphing for emphasis):
I have conceptualized eight paradigms to level up the country’s agriculture sector:
modernization must continue;
industrialization of agriculture is key;
promotion of exports is a necessity;
consolidation of small- and medium-sized farms;
roadmap development would be crucial;
infrastructure development would be critical;
higher budget and investment for Philippine agriculture (are required); and
legislative support is needed.
I say: “Mr Dar’s TNT was/is intellectual dynamite!”
But it was/is dynamite only to those minds who were/are paying intellectual attention as to how to bring PH Agriculture from Z to A, from dead last (kulelat) to #1.
To Mr Dar, it was/is going to help him repeat what he had masterminded years earlier: as Director General, he brought the India-based International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) fromdead last to #1 among 15 international agricultural research agencies in the CGIAR group, which include/d IRRI.
Except that one man and one mind cannot do it alone. This TNT must be shared in belief, thought and action in order to bring the Philippines from Zapped to A1!@517
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