Science with human face: Filipino makes it work in India

By: Jeannette I. Andrade - 10 years ago

BOWINGOUTIN GLORY Former Icrisat chair Stein Bie presents an award to WilliamDar during the institute’s 42nd anniversary celebration on Dec. 12, 2014. Dar bowed out of Icrisat as director general after serving for 15 years. Beside him is hiswife, Betty. CONTRIBUTEDPHOTO

It started to rain as William Dar, the Filipino head of an India-based global agricultural crop research institute, took the dais to say goodbye after 15 years of service.

In the moderately dry southern state of Telangana in India, rain is scarce and precipitation is considered God’s grace.

Dar, a farmer’s son and a former Philippine agriculture secretary, engineered a complete turnaround for the International Crop Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (Icrisat), redefining its mission to truly serve agrarian families in the world’s dryland tropics that cover 55 countries in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa.

As raindrops pelted the ornate canopy over the venue of Icrisat’s 42nd anniversary celebration on Dec. 12, 2014, Dar told his colleagues: “Now rain is coming. That’s a blessing from the Lord. [A] blessing because we need water all this time and I hope that this is an indication that the future is bright for all of us.”

After completing his three-term leadership at Icrisat, Dar said he was ready to weave his magic on and bring back the agency’s motto: “Science with a human face” to the country of his birth.

“I am retiring to the private sector to do for Filipino farmers what I have done in other countries,” Dar, who hails from Ilocos Sur province, told the Inquirer, adding that he has established the “Inang Lupa (Motherland) Movement” to attempt to replicate his success at Icrisat in the Philippines.

Before Dar assumed the post of director general of Icrisat in 2000, the organization was considered a “deficit institution.”

With donors suffering “fatigue” and the institute slowly losing direction, Icrisat was in quite a bad shape when Dar took on the challenge of keeping afloat what most members of the Consortium of International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) Centers considered a “sinking ship.”

‘Surplus institution’

But in 15 years at the helm, Dar achieved the virtually impossible, turning a “deficit institution” into a “surplus institution,” with his brand of science.

Dar was able to quadruple the income and investments poured into Icrisat by its partners and donors of $22 million to the current $85 million. Icrisat’s top three donors outside the CGIAR system are the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the government of India, and the US Agency for International Development (USAID).

“Before our scientists researched for the sake of researching. They used science for the sake of science. But we changed all that. We started refocusing our efforts [on] research that would actually benefit farmers,” Dar said.

“We [at Icrisat] defied approaches of the past, bringing in new approaches that we needed to do agricultural research for development, not research for research’s sake. Not science for science’s sake,” he said.

Farmer’s son

The redirection entailed a new core value for Icrisat, “Science with a human face.” It was after all the motivation for the establishment of the nonprofit research institute that conducts studies on highly nutritious and drought-tolerant crops—chickpea, pigeon pea, groundnut, sorghum and pearl millet—as well as on agricultural management practices to reduce poverty, hunger, malnutrition and environmental degradation in the world’s dryland tropics.

Dar hails from Santa Maria town in Ilocos Sur, where he and his siblings were raised in farming and taught by their parents the importance of earning their keep by selling produce from the family’s 2-hectare land.

He obtained a bachelor’s degree in agricultural education in 1973 from then Mountain State Agricultural College (now Benguet State University). In his book “Feeding the Forgotten Poor,” Dar writes, “The thought of going to engineering or medicine, two most popular streams even then, never crossed my mind. I was a farmer’s son and wanted to know more about a farmer’s work.”

Remarkable ability

Dar received in 1976 his master’s degree in agronomy and in 1980 obtained his doctorate degree in horticulture at the University of the Philippines in Los Baños, Laguna province, on a scholarship from the Philippine Council for Agriculture, Forestry and Natural Resources Research and Development.

In 1998, then President Joseph Estrada invited Dar to join his Cabinet as agriculture secretary and in Jan. 11, 2000, he was named the fifth director general of Icrisat, headquartered in Patancheru in Telangana, India, by the institute’s governing board.

In his speech, Icrisat’s financial officer Rajesh Agrawal said, “The leadership quality required for an institution like us (Icrisat) is not only a great knowledge of science and great appreciation of science but also the other functions of management … He (Dar) has the remarkable ability to identify which are the other critical components required to be able to make Icrisat successful, whether it is human resource or finance or innovation or partnerships, and to be able to put that together into a meaningful thing.”

New ideas

He added: “Icrisat did a great job in the ’70s and the ’80s, ’90s but come the end of the century, at that time, donors were experiencing fatigue in terms of what is new now. What do we fund? What is a new idea? And that is where I think his (Dar’s) contributions in the last 15 years have been tremendous.”

According to Agrawal, Dar revitalized and redefined Icrisat’s agenda through partnerships with private organizations as well as big, medium and small seed companies, the establishment of agribusiness incubators and the hybrid parents research consortium and agricultural studies specifically focused on benefiting farmers.

Among endeavors initiated by Icrisat during Dar’s tenure were the Agricultural Research for Development (AR4D) initiative; Harnessing Opportunities for Productivity Enhancement (Hope) of sorghum and millets project; Tropical Legumes II (TL-II) project; Village Dynamics in Southeast Asia (VDSA) initiative; Inclusive Market-Oriented Development (Imod) project; Agribusiness and Innovation platform; establishment of centers of excellence for genomics, transgenic research, climate change research for plant protection, and information and communications technology innovations for agriculture.

Fearless in taking risks

Dar was also instrumental in the development of the sustainable community-based natural resource management model Bhoochetana, or land rejuvenation, which is combined with watershed technology to enable poor Indian farmers to prosper, and in the establishment of the Icrisat Development Center to ensure that large-scale science-based technologies benefit small farmers.

“To be able to see ahead of others, that ‘Look this is going to make sense’ and he (Dar) did precisely that. He seized the opportunity. (He) didn’t fear taking the risk … and you can see that in [a] variety of areas, Icrisat is considered a pioneer compared to other institutions,” Agrawal said.

In his farewell speech, Dar said: “We (Icrisat) defied those that have been established as methodologies. We saw to it that the products that we generate, the varieties that we breed would have to reach the smallholder farmers in a big way … We have to see to it that the products of science, the technologies we develop must reach the doorsteps and the farms of smallholder farmers of Asia and sub-Saharan Africa.”

He said Icrisat made innovations because “business as usual is no longer tenable.”

“The strategy framework we put in place, inclusive and market-oriented, this mantra of science with a human face, will bring further this institute forward and I will see to it that the same can be translated in various countries of the world and I will do that in my next journey in the Philippines,” he said.

Four ‘pillars’

Dar introduced four “pillars” of agriculture that he developed through his 15 years of experience in Icrisat and vowed to apply them in the Philippines through Inang Lupa Movement and help the country’s agrarian sector surge forward.

The first pillar, he said, is inclusiveness, where farmers are made part of the process to create solutions for agricultural development.

The other pillars are science-based agriculture, resilient agriculture in response to climate change, and market orientation where agriculture must be viewed as a business and the focus should be on how to make farming profitable and attractive to the youth.

Key value

“My lifetime career has been in agriculture. Based on my experiences, my vision is to be able to help nurture an inclusive, science-based, resilient and market-oriented agriculture to help dryland communities worldwide. Sustainability is a key value across these four pillars,” he stressed.

Dar vowed to share his management and technical expertise and knowledge with Filipino farmers to transform the country’s rain-fed and unproductive farmlands into productive, sustainable and climate-smart farms through Inang Lupa Movement.

The movement aims to enhance the food and nutrition security as well as increase the productivity and income of small Filipino farmers through soil rejuvenation, sustainable and integrated natural resource management, the use of improved cultivars and hybrids, and pushing for reforms in the agriculture sector.

He ended his speech by saying: “So concluding this journey with Icrisat, with you, the last 15 years I hope to leave behind a legacy benefiting millions of farmers in India and Africa and other dryland countries of the world.”