MEDIUM RARE
Jullie Y. Daza
To say that it began as a dream is to make the story sound like a fairy tale. But the rise of hybrid rice is a true story, as real as food for the stomach.
As told by the man whose advocacy is to plant the right kind of seeds to make millionaires out of farmers, Henry Lim Bon Liong had dreamed of his mother standing in a rice field, telling him to “plant rice, plant rice.” Once the dream had taken hold, Henry added rice farming to his original calling as a businessman. (When I was a student, the notebooks used by our generation carried the brand name “Sterling Paper,” which was only a small part of the Lim family business then.)
It did not take long before Henry’s enthusiasm turned into a passion, then it became a mission, until he found a way to sit at the feet of no less than the “rice king of China,” who was so impressed with Henry’s goals that he mentored, tutored, and trained the amateur from Manila. Eventually, the project bore fruit, and Henry named his product Doña Maria, after his mother.
On a live TV show sometime in 2005, Henry presented what he called the first batch of hybrid rice millionaires. Twenty years later, his Agritech Corp. heard from no less than the President of the Philippines that planting hybrid rice should be adopted throughout the country to help farmers increase their yields and income.
PBBM met with some of the most productive farmers of Central Luzon, who told him how the switch helped their farms produce from seven to 15 metric tons per hectare compared to 3.6 percent for inbred seeds. (As in human beings, inbreeding is not ideal.)
The cost of converting to hybrid seeds may not be a small one, considering inputs such as fertilizer, irrigation, mechanization, etc., but even so, as chairman and CEO of Agritech, Henry promised to convert nearly two million hectares for hybrid rice planting within the next four years.
As Chitang Nakpil was fond of saying, “it’s easier to make a baby than plant cabbage.” If hybrid rice is part of the solution, at the very least it is no longer a dream.