Southeast Asian Agriculture – Think Different! Think Intellectual! Think Wealth!

SEARCA was once a sleepy country; now it’s challenging all of Southeast Asian agriculture to:

Think different:
Think Intellectual, Think Wealth!

UP Los Baños professor Glenn B Gregorio is barely a year old as Director of Southeast Asian Regional Center for Graduate Study & Research in Agriculture, SEARCA, but already he is challenging the old to think new! First, those academic minds in Southeast Asia and then those at UP Los Baños, where its headquarters are. In fact, it was SEARCA that donated the modern UPLB library years ago.

Friday, 17 April 2020, Brenda Jocson came up with her news report, “IP Assets To Lift Poor Farmers In Searca Program[1]” at the ManilaStandard.net.  Welcome headline, except that it is quite an exaggeration – SEARCA cannot uplift farmers in just one little program!

The following text from Ms Brenda is accurate:

SEARCA is boosting ownership of intellectual property (IP) assets to help prop up agriculture investments while ensuring broader-based wealth distribution among “poorest of the poor” farmers.

More accurately, SEARCA is recommending and urging Southeast Asian member countries to innovate and apply for intellectual property (IP) rights to encourage huge agriculture investments and thus, hopefully, help the farmers rise from poverty. This is part of SEARCA’s 11th Five-Year Plan, authored by Mr Gregorio.

And how is it to be done? Mr Gregorio is advising aggie technocrats, entrepreneurs, and farmers’ cooperatives to think out IP assets. Now, I want to note that, as far as I know, this recommendation is entirely new in SEARCA countries, including the Philippines – it takes an original mind to come up with it. (images: IP from PrizmSolutions[2], farm coop from AgroCrops[3])

I know about Mr Gregorio because he was a member of the board of the Crop Science Society of the Philippines, which is/was based at UP Los Baños, and which published the Philippine Journal of Crop Science, PJCS, of which I was Editor In Chief from 2001 to 2008. He cannot forget me because I was the Editor who catapulted PJCS from a 25-year editorial obscurity into the international journals’ wish list called ISI (now Web of Knowledge/Web of Science). The PJCS was dreaming of being recognized for quality; I made that dream come true in 2007.

Quality Dreams. “The Philippines still has limited capacity to obtain IP assets” – Mr Gregorio is dreaming for Southeast Asia to become very rich via a wealth of IPs: commercialization licenses, patents, copyrights, trade secrets, trademarks – “that hold tremendous value in creating wealth among new entrepreneurs.”

With his leadership, Mr Gregorio promises:

SEARCA will formulate and establish its intellectual-property (IP) policy to ensure that product and technologies reach the intended and ultimate beneficiaries without much financial burden.

That truly is written into SEARCA’s 11th Five-Year Plan.

What else does SEARCA promise to do?

Guided by this IP policy, SEARCA will facilitate licensing and transfer of technologies developed by universities to industry players to create products for the marketplace.

University innovating, industry commercializing: For thinking out loud towards A New Agriculture, thank you, SEARCA!@517

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[1] https://www.manilastandard.net/mobile/article/321827?fbclid=IwAR0SRrSE1QKc_ZRVQ3D4H8T0afVk98vjaAJrI1Yj7oYyS3beVqAGOV9-75o

[2] https://www.prizmsolutions.co.uk/intellectual-property-insurance/

[3] https://www.agrocrops.com/blog_detail/24/farmer-producer-companies-schemes