Sustainable Development With Your Hybrid Rice And My inRevolution

These are revolutionary times. That's exactly why I have this new blog.

Beginning today, Monday, 29 July 2019, I'm going to write about PH agriculture using what I call The inRevolution. I'm referring to the use of modern media any material: text, image, video or mixes that are produced in any manner that is intuitive, innovative, ingenious, intellectual, even incredible – all for Development, all inclusive of the Poor.

Journalists, digital inRevolution is what we need today – and, at 78 going on 79, if I can do it, you can do it!

And, The inRevolution must be for sustainability. In this case, agricultural sustainability.

About any company's hybrid rice, everyone talks about achieving the higher yield, up to treble. But nobody is talking about sustainability! (image from Vermillion Energy, sustainability.vermilionenergy.com)

Differently, I'm talking about If Sustainability. From now on, I'm going to investigate any idea, concept, theory, practice, technology, system, project, program, or initiative in agriculture by trying to ascertain or appreciate first its If Sustainability – that is:
If technically feasible, and
If economically viable, and
If ecologically sound, and
If socially acceptable.

Those are my Big Ifs!

Or, to put it differently, those are 4 Swords of Sustainability precariously hanging over the head of any raiser of crop or livestock, just like the Sword of Damocles that hung over the head of King Dionysius, in the anecdote of Timaeus of Sicily (Wikipedia, en.wikipedia.org).

ANN says the Philippine Rice Research Institute, PhilRice, has its Hybrid Rice Research initiative (Author Not Named, 10 May 2018, PhilRice, philrice.gov.ph), with this Goal:

To develop wide-adaptive, high yielding hybrid rice varieties suited for commercialization with agro-morphological traits, acceptable grain and eating quality, nucleus and breeder seeds of parents, and F1 hybrids in support of hybrid commercialization. It also targets to develop associated integrated crop management technologies for increased seed yield and seed quality of parent lines and F1 hybrids.

Yes, Sir, Mr PhilRice, but our farmers need sustainability now, today!

Well, last March at the 8th National Rice Technology Forum, NRTF, at the boundary of Urdaneta City and Asingan, Pangasinan, hybrid rice producers participated in demo plantings: Bioseed, SL Agritech and Syngenta, among others. At the Forum, they talked about higher yields, but no one talked about insuring sustainability. I will help you propagate your hybrid rice if you can convince me of the sustainability that follows in its use.

By the way, today is "International Tiger Day 2019" – the tiger's population itself is in great need of sustainability (Jagran Josh, Jagran Josh, "International Tiger Day 2019: History And Significance," jagranjosh.com). If I may paraphrase John Donne:

No animal is an island entire of itself; every one is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of they friend's or of thine own were.

So, from now on, I will look at your act
or aim if in sync or out of sync
with sustainability!@517