In a world absorbed in scientific and material ventures that even lead men to the moon, we easily lose sight of that greatest frontier in man himself. On this centenary of Mahatma Gandhi’s birth, the Sarvodaya Shramadana Movement, led by A. T. ARIYARATNE in Ceylon, reassuringly confirms man’s response to challenges of the spirit. 

A Sinhala and a Buddhist, ARIYARATNE first acted against injustice while a college student. Sharing his pocket money with an impoverished, old woman, he learned greedy middlemen paid her too little even for food, though she spun coconut coir 10 hours a day six days a week. Undeterred by a stabbing intended to thwart him, he organized the Coir Workers Cooperation Society that improved the spinners’ lot and still flourishes. 

Seeking national concern for the poor, ARIYARATNE investigated all of Ceylon’s then 20 odd political parties, the responsible government agencies, and religious groups, but found scant promise of social change. It was from study of the works of Acharya Vinoba Bhave, Gandhi’s leading disciple, that he became imbued with the idea of voluntary service based on truth, non-violence and self-denial. 

Remembering Bhave’s admonition that without personal sharing any movement would prove a delusion, ARIYARATNE began in Ceylon by inviting donation of labor from colleagues at Nalanda College, where he was teaching. From ancient Ceylonese tradition he evolved the concept of sarvodaya shramadana, meaning to share one’s time, thought and energy for the welfare of all. 

In 1958, 75 teachers and students of the College went to the outcast village of Kanatolowa. Working with villagers to sink wells, dig latrine pits, clear home gardens and start a school, these volunteers gave the “untouchables” their first sense of human dignity through shared generosity. Requests from other villages followed for similar Shramadana camps where volunteers concentrated their labor on weekends and during vacations upon specific “felt needs” that could be accomplished with donated resources. 

Under ARIYARATNE’s magnetic leadership, Sarvodaya Shramadana became the largest national voluntary movement. Members had only to subscribe to “service for all” and give seven days a year. Other college and university groups, Buddhist monks, doctors, government and factory employees and industrialists joined the crusade. Learning the real needs of their country, these volunteers helped eradicate distrust resulting from caste, race, creed and party politics. Self-confidence generated in villagers produced sustained improvement efforts. 

After five years, the Movement acquired legal status as the Lanka Jatika Sarvodaya Shramadana Sangamaya. Now an “approved charity” with a small professional staff and its resource of 75,000 trained, young volunteers throughout the country, the Movement is honoring the Gandhi Centenary by seeking to transform 100 villages with its message of spiritual ennoblement and volunteers targeted on projects discriminatingly selected and planned. 

In electing AHANGAMAGE TUDOR ARIYARATNE to receive the 1969 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Community Leadership, the Board of Trustees recognizes his founding and inspired guidance of the Sarvodaya Shramadana Movement, combining voluntary service in meeting village needs with an awakening of man’s potential when he cultivates his best instincts.

It is with deep humility and renewed faith in the service of humanity that I rise on this memorable occasion to deliver this brief response. This is an honor you have given to my country, to the Sarvodaya Shramadana Movement of which I am a humble worker, and above all an honor given to chose simple village people who responded to our call of “love and service.” I am only a medium chosen by destiny to assist the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation to carry the spirit of that great leader, the late President Ramon Magsaysay, into the minds and hearts of my own common people for it was for the emancipation of the common man that he lived and died. 

Great men of the caliber of Ramon Magsaysay do not belong to one country or one period or one generation. They are social phenomena that suddenly appear and disappear like flashes of lightning in darkness and show us the path. They belong to the entire universe and eternity. Lord Buddha says “Rupan jeerathi maccanan Nama goththan na jeerathi” which means while all that is mortal in us decays our noble thoughts, words and deeds will live long after our physical remains are gone. The true greatness of a man is known only by the way his fellowmen hold him in esteem after his death. Judging from the name he has left behind to be honored and perpetuated in this manner, I am sure he must now be among the divine. May he bless us all in our endeavors to serve our fellowmen, particularly those that are considered the lowest the lowliest and the lost. 

I believe the Foundation has elected me for the Ramon Magsaysay Award for Community Leadership on the basis of the external manifestations of my behavior in that particular field. Therefore, it is my duty to place before this august assembly some of my inner thoughts that motivated my external behavior. 

In the culture in which I was brought up I was fascinated from my childhood by certain thoughts the implementation of which, however, was postponed by that same culture to the next life. “Peetho bhavatu lokocha”, meaning “may all beings in the universe be well and happy”, was one such thought. Working for a nobler ideal than the ideal of the greater good of the greater number became a passion in my life. Mahatma Gandhi and Acharya Vinoba Bhave called this thought, the welfare of all, by the Sanskrit word sarvodaya. 

For the awakening of all in society we have to awaken ourselves first. Again my own Buddhist culture showed me four noble goals towards which every individual should strive. The first is loving kindness, or metta as we call it. As a good mother loves her one and only child and protects him at the risk of her own life we are taught to love and protect all living beings. Secondly, we are taught to cultivate kanuna, or compassion, which motivates us to go in search of those who suffer and help remove the causes which have brought upon them that suffering. Thirdly, we are taught to train ourselves to take altruistic joy in others’ happiness. We call this muditha. Fourthly, to educate oneself in upekkha, or equanimity, which gives one emotional balance to take fame or blame, profit or loss, success or failure with detachment and patience. These four qualities are called divine abodes because they elevate the follower to divine levels. It is this philosophy of life that motivated me for this silent mission which you have adjudged worthy of honor. 

These are not impractical idealistic thoughts that have no relevance to the modern scientific and technological world. Modernity is not determined by time. It is determined by our attitudes and outlook to life and living. These thoughts we translated into practical application to bring about significant changes in the grass-roots of our society — changes for the better among our rural communities which are the foundation of our culture, freedom and human dignity. And wasn’t it our revered Ramon Magsaysay himself who said that “democracy should start from the grassroots?” 

The technique we adopted to translate thoughts into action was a call to all to share their time, thought and energy? in the service of their fellowmen. We called it shramadana. Sharing (dana), compassionate speech (priya vacana), constructive activity (arthacharya) and equanimity (samanath-matha) are the four salient features of shramadana. 

These thoughts and action in their own small way are laying a strong spiritual and material foundation for rebuilding a new Ceylon — a new Sri Lanka — where I assure you science and spirituality will be harmonized and the island deserve once again to be called Dharmadweepa — The Island of Righteousness. Here and now I declare in the name of that great leader, the Lord Buddha, that every cent of this monetary award and every element of personal recognition that you have given me today will be utilized for this noble end. For I believe as he believed that “you can find yourself only to the extent you can lose yourself.” Lose yourself in what? Lose yourself completely and totally in the service of your fellowmen to free them from the causes of all suffering; namely, greed, ignorance and hatred.

As modern technology becomes omnipresent in daily life, increasingly vital is the question whether it serves the best in man. In education this is especially critical. For the values and capabilities of today’s young often are molded as much by television and radio as by traditional influence of the home environment.Man thus risks becoming the victim of the revolution in mass communications that he has created. His only alternative is to master the media for positive pursuit of civilizing goals. To an exceptional degree, postwar Japan offers encouraging evidence that through educational broadcasting this can be accomplished. 

When Professor MITOJI NISHIMOTO in 1925 gave his first radio lectures on education, very few realized the immense implications of this new mass medium. The British Broadcasting Corporation, then only three years old, had begun producing special programs for schools the previous year, and Germany was to follow in 1926. Commercial broadcasting began in the United States five years carlier, but only in the 1930s did several Mid-western state universities begin using radio for education. After, Japan’s three first stations were joined in the official Japan Broadcasting Corporation, Nippon Hoso Kyokai, in 1926, educational programing awaited NISHIMOTO’s initiative. 

Trained at Tennoji Normal School in Osaka and Columbia University Teachers College in New York, NISHIMOTO’s interest in new tools for instruction led him while a professor at Nara Women’s Higher Normal School, in the late 1920s, to give numerous talks from the Osaka Station. In 1933, as Education Director of this station, he organized Japan’s first school broadcasting. 

NHK started nationwide school broadcasts in 1935 with NISHIMOTO’s help. Within three years, he was transferred to NHK headquarters in Tokyo, serving first as Program Comptroller and later as Education Director. In 1943, after he became the youngest member of NHK’s Board of Directors and was given charge of the Sapporo Station, he continued to write and lecture on the purposes and methods of school broadcasting. 

Following Japan’s surrender in 1945 NISHIMOTO’s participation in wartime broadcasting forced him to resign from NHK. It was a time of drastic change in Japan as the Allied Occupation dismantled authoritative institutions and sought to further democratic goals. In 1950 other networks were licensed and NHK, by law, became a public corporation whose directors are responsible to the Diet and funds are provided by annual receivers’ fees paid by owners of radio and television sets. 

Since 1948 NISHIMOTO’s has been the most influential voice in shaping a fuller use of broadcasting in Japanese education. In that year, anticipating the opportunity and need for materials that followed inauguration of television five years later, he formed the Japan Radio-TV Education Association. Since 1952 he has been a member of the NHK Advisory Committee for School Broadcasting. As founder of the magazine Radio-TV Education, organizer of the first National Education Broadcasting Research Conference, through many other professional broadcasting groups and meetings, numerous books and articles, and scholars he has trained, his ideas have guided NHK to provide one of the world’s outstanding educational broadcasting services. Available to receivers are materials for students in schools at all levels and for teachers correspondence courses and social and cultural education for all citizens. 

Over the past 17 years NISHIMOTO has continued to teach, as at International Christian University, where he organized a model audio-visual education center, and Tezukayama Gakuin University, where he is president. In these institutions, his abiding concern is seen in pace-setting classroom use of instructive broadcasts. 

In electing MITOJI NISHIMOTO to receive the 1969 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Journalism, Literature and Creative Communication Arts, the Board of Trustees recognizes 44 years of discerning design of Japan’s superior educational radio and television broadcasting system.

It is with utmost pleasure that I accept this outstanding and singular honor, the Ramon Magsaysay Award. Established in honor of your late President’s spirit of humbleness and selfless service to mankind, I only hope that I can accept it with the same spirit. 

My receiving this Award symbolizes not just what I have done, but is equally symbolic of what radio and television have done and are doing for education. 

The late President Magsaysay believed in the dignity and importance of people as individuals. He strived to insure that the individual does not suffer in ignorance. Education is one method of insuring such. 

Unfortunately, it has been shown in many countries throughout the world that traditional educational methods are not capable of raising a nation out of ignorance quickly. And time is even more limited in today’s world of technology and rising expectations. 

Since their invention, many educators have dreamed of the value of radio and television in education. But the realization of their dreams has involved traveling a long and tortuous path. It has been only during the past decade that the true value of radio and television in education has come to be recognized. We are now in the Space Age. Apollo 11 was an excellent example of the effective use of television during the moon landing. Without television this wonderful feat might not have been possible at all. So effective a media as this muse be used in education. 

I accept this Award, not only for myself, but for all the others who have also striven to develop the use of radio and television in education. Please accept my humble thanks for allowing me to represent them.

Despite rapid advances in medicine, the twin tyrannies of ignorance of preventive sanitation and resulting illness still afflict much of rural Asia. Farm families yearn for the benefits of modern medicine as much as anyone, but the cost of most existing treatment facilities and drugs places them beyond the reach of ordinary villagers. 

Dr. HSU SHIH-CHU has applied himself to this challenge ever since he completed his internship and graduate studies in public health at Peking Union Medical College in 1934. Organizing a demonstration, self-supporting, community health service in Kiangning County near Nanking in the mid-1930s, training medical officials and combating malaria in West China during the Sino-Japanese War, he was systematically searching for means to make the benefits of modern medicine available to all. 

When Dr. HSU became Chief of the Rural Health Division of the Chinese and American Joint Commission on Rural Reconstruction (JCRR) in 1948, he gained the scope and means to put his ideas to work. Starting on Taiwan the following year, HSU used JCRR assistance to mobilize public-spirited local leaders in each of 361 districts and townships to establish and support health stations. As tax collection improved, these units became the responsibility of local governments. 

Similarly, HSU induced popular cooperation with government health agencies in building village and school water works and latrines, first in public places and then in homes. Also organized were garbage collection and mosquito and fly extermination. To initiate health education for children, JCRR financed two-week training courses for one teacher from each primary school. With this groundwork, mass campaigns eradicated endemic plague from Quemoy Island and rabies, cholera and malaria from Taiwan. Continuing rural services helped control tuberculosis and diphtheria. An index of achievement was the drop in Taiwan’s annual death rate to 6.5 per 1,000, one of the lowest in the world. 

A public health doctor alert to farmers’ needs, HSU focused upon bringing food processing methods up to international standards. Working with farmers’ cooperatives and canneries, he and his staff evolved methods that now allow Taiwan to earn annually over US$31 million from the export of canned mushrooms and US$24 million from canned asparagus. More recently, he assisted farmers and processors in adopting aseptic techniques to launch a new industry of exporting quick-frozen pea pods and other foods. 

Long convinced that permanent improvement in rural livelihood would only become possible with effective family planning, HSU has patiently and persistently prodded government institutions and private groups toward such action. Starting with demographic studies and improved vital statistics, his program gradually incorporated maternity and child health with pre-pregnancy health services enabling women to plan births. As a consequence, Taiwan, which supports some 14 million persons on 850,000 hectares of cultivated land, reduced its rate of natural increase from over three percent to about two percent annually over the past six years. 

To all these efforts, HSU has brought more than superb professional competence and unstinting effort. He has succeeded consistently in bringing provincial and local government agencies, voluntary groups and villagers themselves together toward the common objective of a healthy, vigorous population. 

In electing HSU SHIH-CHU to receive the 1969 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Government Service, the Board of Trustees recognizes his enthusiastic yet practical role in establishing on Taiwan rural health, sanitation and family planning services that are models for developing nations.

I am highly honored to have been named the recipient of the 1969 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Government Service. 

I try to follow the teaching of Lao Tze, an ancient Chinese philosopher, to achieve without claiming credit for oneself. Now the Ramon Magsaysay Award is giving me credit that I can accept only as a representative of my medical profession, my organization, and my colleagues. The Joint Commission on Rural Reconstruction, of which I have been a member for 21 years, is a unique organization. It functions to improve the living condition of the people and to assist other government organizations without claiming any share of the credit. Because of these qualities, it is trusted and welcomed both by the people and government organizations at all levels in the Republic of China. 

The scope of medicine and health is expanding from the curative, preventive, and promotional phases to include village health improvement and community development, family planning and food processing. Through the application of modern medical methods, the annual crude death rate in Taiwan, China, has been brought down to 6.5 per 1,000 and the expectation of life at birth in 1967 reached 64.1 years for males and 68.4 for females. Now our effort is to bring down the high birth rate; we aim to change the population pattern from that of developing countries with high birth rates and low death rates to that of advanced countries with low birth rates and low death rates. Both the public and the government in the Republic of China now believe that family planning is a measure important for socioeconomic development and for a happy family life. 

Taiwan has also entered a new stage of initiating a planned change in its rural areas on a village basis, making the villages improve progressively. To achieve the objective requires both teamwork in health and other fields, and teamwork between government agencies and the people. 

National key leaders with wisdom are important assets of a country. Men are richly endowed with potential wisdom often hidden by selfishness; wisdom emerges only when men become selfless. The life of the late President Ramon Magsaysay has set an illuminating example for people to develop leadership with selfless devotion. The Ramon Magsaysay Award is the unique instrument for continuously reflecting his greatness and ideals.

Distilling more than three millennia of accumulated insight in cultivating man’s leading cereal crop, the INTERNATIONAL RICE RESEARCH INSTITUTE (IRRI), with its creation of “miracle rice,” inaugurated a “green revolution,” promising nearly one-half of humanity the prospect of sufficiency in its staple food. 

Great scientific accomplishments are rarely the product of chance or lonely research. Rather, they result from mustering all available knowledge to focus inquiry upon the critical frontiers of needed advance.

While science over the past 150 years made great strides in temperate agriculture, advances in the tropics were slow. Specialty crops like tea, sugar and rubber received first attention. Failure substantially to expand yields of staple, tropical food crops crippled progress, especially in many new nations where populations burgeoned. 

IRRI at Los Banos was the first coordinated international attempt in the tropics to solve a major problem of world agriculture. Funded by the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations in agreement with the Philippine Government, the INSTITUTE has a multinational Board of Trustees. Likewise, IRRI’s staff under its director, Dr. Robert F. Chandler, Jr., is international. Enlisted are the talents of Chinese, Filipinos, Americans, Indians, Japanese, Thais, Ceylonese, Pakistanis and a Brazilian. 

Since research began at IRRI in 1962, accomplishments have affected every aspect of rice culture. Most consequential is the new plant type of rice designed for the tropics; with narrow, upright leaves, and short, stiff straws, it is responsive to nitrogen without lodging. Unlike most former tropical varieties, the new rice types are non-photosensitive and can be planted at any season in many countries. Plant breeders now seek to add greater resistance to disease and pests. Almost as important have been IRRI’s developments in cultural methods, including use of systemic insecticides, herbicides and improved planting and water control. 

In true scientific tradition, IRRI built upon earlier rice research, particularly from Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines, Australia and the United States. Its germplasm bank now holds a world collection of some 10,000 varieties of rice available to breeders everywhere. In its library are all known technical publications of consequence on rice, often translated from other languages into English. Engaged in research or studying production technology have been 351 scholars, fellows and trainees from 14 Asian countries, from Europe, Africa, the Middle East, Latin America and the United States. Concentrating these human and material resources on a single crop has spurred fruitful collaboration between rice specialists around the globe. 

New varieties of rice released by IRRI, beginning with IR-8, became catalysts. Other research agencies were encouraged to distribute their new varieties for comparative trials. When rice farming became attractively profitable for tropical cultivators, governments mobilized resources in massive campaigns for national rice self-sufficiency. Discovering that such efforts to use new varieties and technology often required “changing the agents of change,” IRRI instituted training for extension men to match learning in the lecture hall and laboratory with actual plowing, planting and weeding in the paddy field. 

In the rice revolution that IRRI is fostering, both farmers and scientists are changing. Converging periodically from around the world upon the Institute, scientists have moved beyond concern with professional recognition to measuring accomplishment in farmers’ use of their findings. 

In electing the INTERNATIONAL RICE RESEARCH INSTITUTE to receive the 1969 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Peace and International Understanding, the Board of Trustees recognizes seven years of innovative, interdisciplinary teamwork by Asian and Western scientists, unprecedented in scope, that is achieving radical, rapid advances in rice culture.

For the INTERNATIONAL RICE RESEARCH INSTITUTE, which as director I have the privilege to represent, this is a day of pride, of gratitude and of renewed dedication. The Ramon Magsaysay Award is an honor of such consequence that those upon whom it is bestowed cannot but be subdued by a deepened sense of their responsibilities to mankind and stimulated by an active need to find new ways in which to serve. Thus, the Award simultaneously endows the recipients with historic recognition and confronts them with a subtle challenge. 

For all who share in our endeavors, the fact that the International Rice Research Institute was selected for its contribution to “international understanding” is a most meaningful and satisfying circumstance of the honor. As is evident from its name, an international theme was implicit in the role of the Institute from the start. There was never any doubt that the problems that called such an institute into being were international in scope, nor that the talent needed to attack them would exceed national boundaries, ignoring such irrelevancies as race and creed. 

In the audience today are most of the Institute’s top scientists, representing seven nationalities. Each was invited to join the organization for reasons completely outside national and ethnic origins, but concerned instead with such appropriate distinctions as education, experience and ability. The resultant heterogeneity enlivened rather than hindered the program. 

Similarly, in the Institute’s housing area the successful commingling of races and cultures is a fascinating and observable fact. There, some 60 children, playing together in the apparent absence of any segregation principle other than age group, offer further proof that much of man’s pride and prejudice is unnatural and is due largely to the conditioned responses of young minds molded by the dictates of traditional social environments. 

In an even wider range of geographic diversity, the Institute’s present training programs in rice production and rice research together include participants from 20 different countries, not only of Asia but of Africa and Latin America as well. After living and working together for periods of six months to two years, such persons return home not only as exponents of modern rice technology but also as agents and catalysts for improved international understanding. 

Indeed, international understanding seems to be a valuable if inadvertent by-product of the Institute’s efforts to improve world rice production. As our scientists travel abroad and as other, particularly Asian, scientists visit them here, cooperative projects are initiated, ideas are exchanged and mutual respect develops. 

There is a further gratifying aspect of the Institute’s inclusion in today’s ceremonies. As an organization founded and located in the Philippines, employing and largely dependent on the services of Filipinos, beholden to the Government of the Philippines and to its educational adjuncts for vital cooperation, and identified in innumerable ways with the daily life of this Republic, the International Rice Research Institute can conceive of no prize more fitting than the Ramon Magsaysay Award. 

On the subject of the Institute’s host country, no accolade is complete without warm mention of the Institute’s neighbors at the College of Agriculture of the University of the Philippines, nor without a special tribute to their dynamic leader. The willing efforts and invaluable assistance of the dean and his colleagues have meant for the Institute a sum total of professional and congenial cooperation without which the accomplishments of the International Rice Research Institute would be notably less. Indeed, if those who had a hand in selecting the site of the Institute about 10 years ago were to repeat the search, clearly our choice should be the same. 

The environment could not have been more rewarding. Today it is evident that the Philippines has set an example for the world of how a disciplined, well-organized national effort can bring to the point of self-sufficiency in rice a country formerly dependent on the importation of that prime commodity. The achievement would not have been possible, of course, without the complete backing and the intense interest of the President, without the coordinated efforts of government agencies and of progressive civic groups nor, let us remember, without the courage of the farmers to break away from the past. 

It seems fitting, furthermore, that we of the Institute remind ourselves that no such venture as our succeeds without initial and continuous support, and that the International Rice Research Institute would not be represented at these celebrated proceedings today would not, indeed, exist at all were it not for the two foundations that not only endowed with reality the vision of such an institute but also were responsible for the very conception of that vision. Our debt to the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, who continue to provide the funds and the moral backing essential to the Institute’s operation, is too immense for repayment except in terms of gratitude and of dedicated performance now and in future. 

The coming decade promises to be even more challenging for the Institute than the last. IR-8, the so-called “miracle rice,” soon will be replaced by varieties equally high-yielding but with greatly improved grain appearance and eating and cooking qualities. Those varieties in turn will be succeeded by others with even more desirable characteristics. Supporting such plant improvement will be innovations in management practices and in farm machinery, the whole backed by concentrated attention to the economic problems arising from consistently high rice yields. 

Such advances will not concern the Institute alone but increasingly will be shared by other research stations through Asia, and elsewhere. We earnestly hope, nevertheless, that for many years to come the International Rice Research Institute will be known as a center of excellence to which the developing countries may look for stimulation and inspiration, no less than for new data and scientific findings. We hope that our hundreds of “graduate”  (if such they may be termed) will serve as nuclei of constructive agricultural change, and that the benefits of the “rice revolution” will adequately feed and significantly enrich the lives of the rice-consuming and rice-growing peoples of the world. 

The challenge is constant, for future advances in food production even at their combined maximum cannot indefinitely keep abreast of the needs of a rapidly expanding world population. Man must soon resolve to control his own numbers, or face extinction. Certainly, his reason will prevail and he will continue to inherit the earth! 

In the meantime, to make our planet abundant in every form of human food is a critical necessity. Toward that need the International Rice Research Institute rededicates its efforts and, in the process, resolves to continue to further the cause of human understanding.

Few countries have suffered as totally from the ravages of war in modern times as Korea. Among the human casualties were nearly two million refugees who fled from Communist rule in the north seeking greater freedom in South Korea. Subsisting on what they could scavenge and on relief, many of these refugees were farmers and, in the overcrowded peninsula, there was no unoccupied, arable land. 

KIM HYUNG SEO, his wife and newborn daughter, during the fighting in 1951 had joined the long trek, arriving eventually in the southwestern coastal region of Cholla Nam Do. Though he found odd jobs, relief food still was needed to supplement his meager earnings. Watching other less fortunate, idle refugees, he resolved to find a way for them to become self-supporting, while relief was available. In the South Korean Government’s policy of allowing refugees to resettle on reclaimed mountain or tidal land, he saw the opportunity. 

Born of a farming family on Korea’s west central coast and a teacher by profession, KIM also had learned practical engineering. Near Sachon, he discovered a suitable tide flat and won government permission to reclaim it in cooperation with 106 families from his home district in the north. Living chiefly on U.S. Public Law 480 grain provided through voluntary agencies, the refugees built a sea dike over 1,464 meters long. Upon completion, including two reservoirs, canals and a drainage gate, in December 1961, more than 106 hectares of fertile, reclaimed land were distributed among the participating families. 

This first success prompted KIM to plan the much larger Daeduk Self-Support Assimilation Project in late 1961. Largely with hand labor and pushcart railways, 5,175 men, women and children built sea dikes ranging from three to 15 meters high and nearly two kilometers long, linking three small islands with the mainland. To irrigate some 1,000 hectares of land, they dug 48 kilometers of intake canals and 32 kilometers of drainage canals. Freezing rain and snow slowed the work and storms eight times destroyed incomplete dikes. Yet, neat houses, roads and wells were all complete by May 1966, when the reclaimed land was apportioned to the 1,329 families in time for planting their first summer crop. 

Fortified by these experiences and helped by the Korean Church World Service, CARE, Catholic Welfare Service, the voluntary agency, CORSO, and the Freedom from Hunger Campaign of New Zealand, the Eighth Army and Operations Mission of the United States, and the Ministry of Health and Social Affairs, KIM mobilized new groups of refugees and poor farmers to reclaim other tidal land while Daeduk was underway. The largest undertaking of KIM and his Korean Association for Development of Assimilation Projects, known as KADAP, was completed in June 1969, when 2,770 hectares were retrieved from Haechang Bay. Impressed with KIM’s achievements, the Government, meanwhile, has turned to him to complete other reclamation projects that had floundered. 

KIM acknowledges that such large-scale construction could be accomplished faster with heavy earthmoving equipment. In Korea, as in much of the developing world, however, the greatest available resource is underemployed manpower. Utilizing “food for work” with detailed engineering and selfless leadership, KIM is mustering this latent resource for national development. For himself, he takes a modest salary as Chairman of KADAP and accepted only a worker’s share of land from the first project at Sachon. On each of the nine other reclamation projects managed by KIM, he has donated the land to which he was entitled by law as project leader to families of veterans and vagrants and to a school foundation for education of the young in the new communities he has helped create. 

In electing KIM HYUNG SEO to receive the 1969 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Public Service, the Board of Trustees recognizes his sturdy, productive leadership of fellow refugees and other landless countrymen in reclaiming for themselves new agricultural land from the sea.

In this renowned capital of the Republic of the Philippines, one of our allied nations in the common cause of defending freedom against communist aggression, it is only proper that a humble unknown Korean farmer should take the opportunity of this honor to express his heartfelt thanks to all the people of the Republic of the Philippines for sending their beloved husbands and sons to the battlefields of Korea. 

This Award for Public Service is, as you all know, associated with the highest spirit of sacrifice and service for the public good, illustrated by the life and work of one of the world’s greatest leaders, the late President Ramon Magsaysay, in whom your country takes great pride and whom we of Korea, Asia and the whole world admire. You can never imagine how much privilege and honor I feel upon receiving the Award on this inspirational occasion marking the 62nd birth anniversary of that great man of service. This is the most glorious moment that I have had in my life. 

I have only done what I considered to be my duty, and will continue to do so. I sincerely believe this Award is far above what I deserve and that it may well be a meaningful impetus for my future endeavor in the service of the public good. More importantly I would rather assume that this Award is not meant for a single person but for all my fellow refugees and all displaced people who have tried hard to stand on their own feet and have combined their efforts to develop their newly settled communities in the spirit of self-help. 

At the time I moved to the south with other refugees and found freedom we were confronted with the imminent need for subsistence. We turned our back on the communist tyranny only to find ourselves in the midst of a new enemy that was poverty. 

We came to realize that communist aggression is not the only threat to our lives, peace and security. An even greater threat comes from ignorance, poverty and disease. We have fully realized that where these major social evils exist communism can prevail and we can enjoy neither genuine freedom nor peace and prosperity. All through the dark days in a warstricken land we never gave up hope but struggled against every obstacle and hardship. We all pooled our utmost energies to become self-reliant so that we might regain our God-given right to lead a decent human life. 

At this moment I recall to my mind the great spirit of dedicated service of the late President Ramon Magsaysay who devoted his life to the security and welfare of his people. He inspired all freedom-loving people with his revered personality and through his admirable performance as a model of a democratic citizen. He was a cogent symbol of the fact of life that nothing is impossible where there is a will. 

My heart is overwhelmed by a strong feeling that this Ramon Magsaysay Award for Public Service is an indelible mark of the truth that perseverance and cooperation for the good of society and the country can bring about a miracle in human life. This truth was also realized by the late President Ramon Magsaysay. I deeply appreciate the decision of the Trustees of the Foundation to confer the Ramon Magsaysay Award for Public Service on me. 

“I also wish to express my appreciation to the Government of the Republic of Korea, international organizations and foreign voluntary agencies without whose assistance our self-help efforts would not have been successful”. 

“Finally, I pray that God bless the People of the Republic of the Philippines with eternal peace and prosperity”.