Speaking at the APAIR NatCon 2018

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One afternoon, I received an email from the DG's Office requesting me to sub for Matthew at a conference at the Ateneo de Manila University... I had to talk about sustainability in development. Wow, this appears to be my first speaking assignment as part of the Sustainable Impact Platform. I gladly accepted because one of the things I want to do is to encourage students to take up the sciences... and because I used to teach at the ADMU.

On the day itself, I was told that the attendees were mostly in senior and junior high school and in college. My session's audience was supposed to be a mix of students interested in humanitarian and environmental topics. I thought that that was cool. After all, I taught Biotechnology for non-Biology majors.

My topic was entitled "Ensuring sustainability through rice research for development in the Philippines". I opted to feature IRRI's work in collaboration and with funding from the Philippines' Department of Agriculture, such as the Heirloom Rice Project, Next-Gen, PRISM, Rice Crop Manager, and WateRice. 


But how do I make the audience relate to the plight of the farmers? I had to bring the topic of farmers' incomes and expenses in context with what they know. I assumed that this age group is into collecting those annual Starbucks planners so I thought that I could use that idea. Marc Adrian Padillo calculated that one could get a planner by spending Php 2610 on a combination of handcrafted and of holiday beverages.


Coincidentally, one of the references I used stated that Php 2610 (that's about USD 50) is also what a farmer could get on average (per month) from proceeds of farming. These value examples made quite an impact to me while I was prepping for my talk that I had to include these in.

Did I make much of an impact on the audience? That is something I would like to see in the future. In the meantime, I am happy that ADMU's Project for ASEAN and International Relations (APAIR) is making inroads towards encouraging students to think about science, technology, and society as they study international relations and diplomacy. I am truly honoured for being given a chance to talk about the good work that IRRI is doing to help Filipino farmers through technological assistance.

Thank you, Bruce, for recommending me for this assignment!

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