"Crunch Time," The Evening Paper
Issue of 13 March 1996
The Philippines has fallen way behind its neighbors in science and technology, and those neighbors are all crowing about it. How anchor our claim to sustainable economic growth when all others around us are overwhelming us with their corps of scientists, technologists, researchers, and technicians? This, I told myself, was a good enough subject for a column.
And it would have been--the subject of this column, that is--had I not heard again on the radio, on my way to the office, another tale of wifely woe: another Filipina, her regional accent very audible, begging a husband in Saudi Arabia for what he sounded quite unwilling to provide before he comes home later in the year.
What price all those days we set aside every year to honor Filipino women if a great number of them allow themselves to be reduced to such an insulting state of total and abject dependence on others?
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Simmons walks with a stick and declines to disclose her age, but neighbors remember she first came to a neglected and rundown Connecticut farm as a young woman in 1929.
Over the years, she has painstakingly transformed the property. She began by planting one small herb plot, laying the stone walks with her bare hands.
Now, says Reuters correspondent Jacqueline Weaver, visitors to Caprilands will find 34 gardens and period or reproduction buildings all over the property. A productive afternoon visit to the farm would include a walk about the gardens, bookstore, greenhouse, and gift shop, followed by a daily lecture on herb gardening and a meal in Simmons' 18th-century home.
Today's growth stories, whether we like it or not, are being written by people who are willing to work. Hard. With both hands and minds. In their own countries.
Adelma Grenier Simmons has inspired the planting of thousands of herb gardens across the United States. Founder of the 23.5-hectare Caprilands Herb Farm, she conducts lectures that are often booked solid. She has written more than 48 books on herbal gardening, herbal folklore, and the use of herbs in cooking and decorating.
Simmons walks with a stick and declines to disclose her age, but neighbors remember she first came to a neglected and rundown Connecticut farm as a young woman in 1929.
Over the years, she has painstakingly transformed the property. She began by planting one small herb plot, laying the stone walks with her bare hands.
Now, says Reuters correspondent Jacqueline Weaver, visitors to Caprilands will find 34 gardens and period or reproduction buildings all over the property. A productive afternoon visit to the farm would include a walk about the gardens, bookstore, greenhouse, and gift shop, followed by a daily lecture on herb gardening and a meal in Simmons' 18th-century home.
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The association wants to expand the current 26,000 hectares of coffee plantations and rehabilitate old bushes, some of which were planted by French colonialists as far back as the 1930s. With new plantations, the target is to achieve a yield double the current 600 kilograms per hectare.
ACE was formed last July with the aim of boosting exports. Since 1991, French and Australian agronomists have been helping the association set up a coffee research and development center in the highlands under a World Bank-funded program.
Nhouyvanisvong is convinced Laotian coffee output will someday match that of neighboring Vietnam, which has a booming coffee industry with at least a 200,000-ton harvest in the 1995-96 season.
Poverty is not exclusive to the Philippine milieu, but somewhere in life's circuitous routes, could some of our women--and men, too--have lost their initiative and imagination? Sometimes, the processes of urban migration and overseas employment render many of our people helpless and dependent, divesting them of some of our ancestors' known virtues. Like hard work, resourcefulness, ambition.Bounlap Nhouyvanisvong is vice president of the Lao Association of Coffee Exporters. "By the year 2000, we expect to export at least 15,000 tons of coffee," he told a Reuters correspondent visiting the Bolaven Plateau in southern Laos.
The association wants to expand the current 26,000 hectares of coffee plantations and rehabilitate old bushes, some of which were planted by French colonialists as far back as the 1930s. With new plantations, the target is to achieve a yield double the current 600 kilograms per hectare.
ACE was formed last July with the aim of boosting exports. Since 1991, French and Australian agronomists have been helping the association set up a coffee research and development center in the highlands under a World Bank-funded program.
Nhouyvanisvong is convinced Laotian coffee output will someday match that of neighboring Vietnam, which has a booming coffee industry with at least a 200,000-ton harvest in the 1995-96 season.
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Today's growth stories, whether we like it or not, are being written by people who are willing to work. Hard. With both hands and minds. In their own countries.
-- NBT
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