Refocusing Agriculture in the Philippines
Refocusing Agriculture: Excerpt from my Convocation Speech at the 45th Founding Anniversary of Visayas State University (VSU)-Alangalang Campus, Leyte, Philippines on 09 Sept 2016. By V.B. Asio Your theme “Agrivolution: refocusing farming for food and nutrition security” is very timely and very relevant. When I was an agriculture student in ViSCA in 1980, the agriculture battle cry was: we need to increase crop yield by increasing the yield per unit area and by cultivating new lands because of rapidly increasing population . Population of the country at the time was only 48 million. The hot research topic was farming system, which slowly became cropping system, then sustainable agriculture or ecological farming, and now organic agriculture. If you examine these farming strategies, they are closely related. But the last, which is organic agriculture, has become very narrow in scope and very impractical in many aspects. But where are we now? Now more than 30 years have passed, with a st...