The 1967 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Public Service

RESPONSE of Sithiporn Kridakara
Ramon Magsaysay Award Presentation Ceremonies
31 August 1967 Manila, Philippines

In accepting the 1967 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Public Service, I cannot find words to express adequately the sense of appreciation and gratification that I feel on being so highly honored; this feeling of gratification is accompanied by surprise and astonishment that the Board of Trustees should have delved so diligently into my past and the work that I began so long ago, when the Chairman of the Board was still a small boy and the Executive Trustee had not even been born. So it is with profound emotion that I ask the Board of Trustees of the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation to accept my grateful and sincere thanks for the high honor bestowed upon me, thanks not only on my own behalf, but on behalf of my descendants who will always feel proud that their ancestor was an Awardee of the Foundation.

However, I must emphasize that my work would have been of little use if it had not been carried on so well by my colleagues and associates, who like many others after them were alumni of the College of Agriculture at Los Baños, and I feel happy that I have lived long enough to see that the educational ties started a half century ago, which have been so beneficial to the agriculture of my country, have ripened into the friendship now firmly established between the Republic of the Philippines and Thailand.

On this day, the 60th anniversary of the birth of the late President Ramon Magsaysay, may I have the privilege of saying some words, which I hope will help in a small way to keep alive the "spirit of Magsaysay," his dedication to improving the lot of the common man.

Specifically, I would like to speak of the millions who form the vast majority in our part of the world, namely the farmers, the humble tillers of the soil, whose welfare Ramon Magsaysay had so much at heart.

But to begin with, it will be appropriate to voice sentiments which I am sure the whole world would endorse, and that is to pay tribute, express admiration and tender thanks to the famous family, who is represented here by one of the descendants of the founder—the family of Rockefeller.

They are famous not for having been statesmen or war heroes or even movie stars, who seem nowadays to shine so much in the public eye, but for their munificent gifts, which through various agencies have, in an unobtrusive and quiet way, promoted innumerable projects throughout the world, all to improve or find ways of improving the lot of mankind. But of all the many projects, the one which will be of the greatest benefit to the human race may well turn out to be a project in which—to quote Mr. Ripley—believe it or not, I had a small, if insignificant, part.

Back in the 1950's when I was Chairman of the International Rice Commission, a meeting of one of the working parties of the Commission being held in Bangkok happened to coincide with the visit of Mr. Weaver and Mr. Harrar of the Rockefeller Foundation. They asked me in what ways the Foundation could help us, and I made three suggestions, the most important of which was the great need to have in this part of the world a center in which research work on rice, in all its aspects, could be carried out. Of course the Foundation must have considered the views of many more competent authorities, but I confess that I have been nursing a feeling of satisfaction that I may have set the ball rolling, as it were, and what I had long hoped for has actually come to pass. For the Rockefeller Foundation in cooperation with the Ford Foundation, with the active encouragement and the generous facilities given by the Government of the Philippines, established the International Rice Research Institute, and I believe that this institution will be of the greatest benefit to the human race because it will be a major instrument in warding off the most appalling catastrophe which threatens mankind, the threat of hunger and starvation.

Scientists in other countries, including my own, are no doubt working hard to find ways of increasing crop production, but the Rice Research Institute has made the first breakthrough and evolved a variety of the indica type of rice, which has in many countries produced the astonishing yield of six tons per hectare, the result of painstaking work on the part of the scientists of the Institute, which is beyond praise and worthy of the highest admiration. May I take this opportunity to congratulate them with wishes that they will achieve further successes in their valuable work.

Scientists may in the future find other ways of obtaining these high yields, but, after all is said and done, it is the farmers who have to implement the work of the scientists. The Director General of the FAO has been telling us that world stocks of food have never been so low, and it is up to the farmers to relieve the situation; the job of saving the world from hunger will in the last resort fall on their shoulders. And are they getting a fair chance to do this job? I believe the answer to be in the negative. In fact, speaking as a farmer on behalf of all the farmers in our part of the world, I venture to suggest that they are not getting a fair deal. One often reads how a country is making great progress, the per capita income having increased from $100 to $150 or whatever it may be. But does this present a true picture of progress? Not when say 70 per cent of the population are farmers and their share of the national income amounts to only 30 per cent with the 30 per cent minority getting the balance of the 70 per cent income. In such a case the per capita income of the farmers may be about half the national average. This surely cannot be called real progress. For the fruits of progress are enjoyed by an affluent minority, thriving on the wealth produced by the majority working under conditions of near poverty.

"The spirit of Magsaysay" revolts against such conditions and calls for a better and a more equitable distribution of incomes, if the farmers are to have a fair chance of doing their job. For not only should our farmers have sufficient incomes to maintain a reasonably high standard of living, but also they must be able to pay their debts and accumulate savings. To obtain the high yield of six tons per hectare, hard labor alone is not enough; heavy applications of fertilizers will be required. A crop of 10 million tons sufficient to feed 40-50 million people will require one million tons of fertilizer at a cost of 100 million dollars.

How can poor farmers meet this and other heavy expenditures from their own resources? It would mean getting indebted to the affluent minority to save that affluent minority from hunger, an ironical situation not without hidden dangers. Without incentives and hopes for a better way of life, why should they incur heavy debts, when what they are producing is sufficient for their small wants?

It is hoped that those who hold the destiny of these millions in their hands are giving serious thought to these problems, and formulating plans to attain a really equitable distribution of incomes, as the affluent countries of the West have done and thereby attained for their peoples a measure of prosperity undreamt of when I was a young man. Cannot we do the same? Our farmers must be able to stand on their own feet with money, saved in banks or traditionally in the form of gold, to achieve what Ramon Magsaysay worked and hoped for. This would be real progress and give farmers a fair chance of doing their job of saving the world from hunger and starvation.