Schools, Universities & Colleges (SUCs) – In Playing Your Expected Roles In Research, Development & Extension (RD&E), Where Is Development And Where Is Extension? Agriculture Secretary William Dar Is Asking!

I say, all those state-supported schools. universities & colleges (SUCs) in the Philippines, led by UP Los Baños, which supposed to be innovating by doing research, development and extension (RD&E) in Agriculture, have been doing much R and hardly performing D, much less E!

I present that as the background to keynote address of Secretary of Agriculture William Dar at the 25 May 2022 “Inclusive Innovation Conference” sponsored by the Department of Trade & Industry (DTI), that the Department of Agriculture (DA), through its agency Bureau of Agricultural Research (BAR), has been allocating an average of P446 million yearly to SUCs for their “development, technology commercialization, research facilities, and scholarships starting 2017.” ANN says (Author Not Named, 26 May 2022, “DA Invests P2.2B In SUCs For Outputs To Benefit Agri Sector,” Department of Agriculture, DA.gov.ph), specifically Mr Dar said:

We need more output and convincing outcomes arising from these investments. Please keep elevating your game.

Not even the lead among the SUCs, UP Los Baños, has elevated its game. An alumnus of the UP College of Agriculture (UPCA), now UP Los Baños, I should know, as I have been in and out of the Los Baños campus since 1959. I graduated from UPCA in 1965; was employed as Chief Information Officer (not the title) of the Forest Research Institute, based in the UPLB campus. Long before UPCA became UP Los Baños, UPLB has always been brandishing its activities as comprising RD&E. Unfortunately, over the years, up to now, UP Los Baños has been doing mostly Research, Research, Research! Hardly Development, and much less Extension. Likewise, the other SUCs.

Today, I also note that it is only Mr Dar, himself a PhD alumnus in Horticulture of UP Los Baños, who has implicitly castigated UPLB as the leader of the SUCs in failing their roles in D and E. Aside from Instruction, the other SUCs have also been doing Research, Research, Research!

Development would be combing up the results of research – new and/or improved knowledge – and packaging them for Filipino farmers into tips, techniques, tricks, technologies for production, processing and pocketing profits. At the very least, these should be presented in publications, better in websites.

Extension is something else. There is an impending food crisis, Mr Dar says:

You must blaze the trail in never-before breached frontiers of science, innovation, and technology, with the resources at your disposal: your vast tracts of land not just as experimental fields but also as food hubs in themselves.

ANN says, “According to the Secretary, main innovations could lie in the simplest transformations such as the expansion of the SUCs’ roles in the community.”

“Expansion of the SUC’s roles in the community” – I take that to mean in 1 word: Extension. SUCs, if you do not extend your new or improved knowledge even to the community where you are based, you are at best only half-performing your social role. I say, shame on you!@517