SEARCA – How Is It Investing In Graduate Study & Research In Agriculture?

We have a new Director of the Southeast Asia Regional Center for Graduate Study & Research in Agriculture, SEARCA: Glenn B Gregorio, TOYM awardee, NAST Academician and one of the world's top breeders in rice and corn. Image shows, left to right: Ethel Agnes Pascua-Valenzuela, Director of SEARCA Secretariat; UPLB Chancellor Fernando Sanchez Jr; Education Secretary Leonor M Briones handing out the "scepter" to the honoree; his wife Myla Beatriz, and the 6 Gregorio children, 1 boy. Our honoree is both productive in research and real life!

I was invited to the investiture, which happened yesterday, Monday, 28 October 2019, at the SEARCA Umali Auditorium, with country members/representatives of the SEARCA Governing Board in attendance. Mr Gregorio is the 11th SEARCA Director, and he talked of the 11th Five-Year Plan.

The new SEARCA Director said:

The key to securing the future of SEARCA is inclusive innovation and interconnectivity, that is – Academe-Industry-Government Interconnectivity towards an Innovation-centered, Partnership-driven, and Infrastructure-based SEARCA.

I love that!

Note that in the full name of the Southeast Asian center, there are these words:

Graduate Study and Research.

Before this, I was asked to look into the draft of a book on sustainable development and the twice-yearly Asian Journal of Agriculture and Development, AJAD, that SEARCA has been publishing for 16 years.

That book would be welcome to both the academic and research worlds. That journal is impressive. The last issue, up-to-date, is June 2019, a thick one, 150 pages. As an Editor in Chief of 44 years experience in agriculture and forestry public and private, I can see that the AJAD is of high quality – but not yet Excellent.

Now then, as far as I know, and I have been going in and out of the Los Baños Science Community in the last 50 years, SEARCA has not harnessed the intellectual power of the findings of its own graduate students in their theses and dissertations, as well as SEARCA results of research. That field is where I can contribute directly and much.

You see, I can say I have been Editor in Chief all my life, since 1975, when I founded and edited-in-chief the Forest Research Institute, FORI, monthly newsletter Canopy, quarterly technical journal Sylvatrop, and quarterly popular magazine Habitat. After FORI, I never left the editing world, even graduating into the digital universe on my own.

A one-man digital work that I am very proud of is to have been Editor in Chief of the Philippine Journal of Crop Science, PJCS, the quarterly journal of the Crop Science Society of the Philippines, CSSP. I made the PJCS reach world-class or achieve ISI status where all previous editors in the last 25 years failed.

For SEARCA and all those graduate studies and researches, I am thinking of building a digital library accessible to anyone anytime anywhere, where the bits and sets of knowledge gained are presented in context, as options for decision. There is no such type of digital library in the world today. Right: Information innovation-centered, partnership-driven, and infrastructure-based SEARCA!@517