The lot in life of self-employed women in South and Southeast Asia is usually marginal at best. As milkmaids, vendors of vegetables, fish, fruit or sundries, or sewing and embroidery pieceworkers they are working with scant odds in their favor. Stall rents are relatively high, interest rates on working capital usually exorbitant, and they seldom have a cash cushion to allow for the disasters that illness, storm or arbitrary official regulations can bring.

Just how acute the conditions are under which self-employed women live is evident in Ahmedabad, with its population of 1.7 million the largest city in the West Indian State of Gujarat. Among self-employed women there—who also may pull carts, repair and sell used garments or hammer junk into utensils for earnings that range from the equivalent of US$0.25 to US$1.70 per day—nearly 97 percent live in slums and 93 percent are illiterate. Ninety-two percent are married, often at age 10 or 12, and on the average have four children. About two-thirds are below the age of 25 and 60 percent are in debt. More than three-fourths work with rented means of production, and 70 percent must carry their children to their work site—often beside the road or in a crowded corner. Although these self-employed women may outnumber workers in regular factories and other establishments, even census figures frequently ignore them.

In 1972 a 39 year-old lawyer turned social worker, daughter of a high court judge, took on the challenge of helping these depressed women. ELA RAMESH BHATT for four years had been chief of the women’s section of the Textile Labor Association founded in 1920 by the “Father of Modern India,” Mahatma Gandhi. With 120,000 members in 60 Ahmedabad textile mills, this Association bargained with employers for better working conditions, meanwhile seeking better health and social and spiritual advancement for members’ families, many of whom came from the outcaste Harijans or untouchables.

Mrs. BHATT, with support of the Association, first organized selfemployed women—who often were the wives of textile workers—in the Self-Employed Women’s Association. Within three years the organization had enlisted over 5,000 members and won the privilege of registration with the government as a trade union. By organizing, these self-employed women were in a position to protect each other from such things as extortion by abusive policemen and inspectors.

Usurious loans were a major burden to them for which ELA BHATT’s next answer was creation of the Mahila SEWA Cooperative Bank where these women bought shares for US$1.30 each. The Bank now has over 4,500 shareholders, and some 10,000 women have deposited about US$35,000 therein. Training in accounting and in repayment of loans has led to learning other business skills. From this has grown a new, more positive life view. A day care center has been established for children of vegetable vendors which allows them to tend better to their business. The Self-Employed Women’s Association has created a modest health, death and maternity benefit scheme, and helps improve the designs of tools and equipment the women use.

In this enterprise Mrs. BHATT and her associates are fostering development where it matters most—among the poorest and weakest in the community. Their accomplishments in Ahmedabad suggest the possibilities, given leadership, for self advancement among the millions of self-employed women in Asia’s other burgeoning cities.

In electing ELA RAMESH BHATT to receive the 1977 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Community Leadership, the Board of Trustees recognizes her making a reality of the Gandhian principle of self-help among the depressed work force of self-employed women.

I am here to thank you personally on behalf of my family, my colleagues, and the members-workers of the two organizations to which I belong, namely the Textile Labor Association and the Self-Employed Women’s Association—popularly known as SEWA, in Ahmedabad, India.

I belong to an ordinary middle class family, brought up and educated like other girls. It was the most significant moment in my life when I was drawn towards my toiling sisters—illiterate slum dwellers, but economically very active, powerful and cheerful—from whom I obtain all my strength, knowledge, answers and hope. It is at their insistence that SEWA as a union, SEWA Cooperative as a bank and SEWA Trust as social security, have come into being. Working with them takes me towards a realization that God is everywhere.

Is it really the few big dams, or huge industrial plants or metropolises that change the face of the world? No, even a small uplift in the capacities of the people is able to bring total change in the world.

Most often human capacities are underestimated by us, hence we put blind faith in machines which lead to centralization of money and power. Even the present structures—legal, economic and social, including trade unions and cooperatives—fail to cater to the needs of people. Let us ask ourselves, for whom do we build our towns, roads, industries, markets, schools and laboratories?

The hard struggle that men face in a life of poverty is harder for women who most often work at the expense of their families. For the woman the economic problem of earning her daily bread is linked with her entire social and physical life.

From humble experience I have learned that it is possible to organize, without too much elaborate technique or expense, poor self-employed women workers for self-help. Women are ready to be organized and are capable of utilizing assistance and ideas if exposed to them.

The trade union movement has promoted the growth of the organized industrial sector. In developing countries industrialization and unionization have proceeded hand in hand. The benefits of development have reached the organized workers, but the share of the self-employed poor has yet to grow.

In Asia a very large number of women are participating in the economic activities of their countries. The industrial unions and social security cover a very small, insignificant part of the total number of working women. We hope this will be a turning point for the labor and cooperative movements to act unitedly for the emancipation of working women from economic, social and political suppression.

This Award has reassured us that we are on the right track in our endeavor, and has given encouragement not only to SEWA members, but also to millions of self-employed women workers elsewhere, to organize themselves and realize the power generating from association outside their homes.

Therefore the 1977 Ramon Magsaysay Award is an honor to the non-industrial, self-employed women and men of Asia who are not destined to live depressed forever. A new challenge has emerged for those running economic organizations and also for social workers.

I am proud to receive the Award on behalf of the self-employed women who are the real recipients of it and for whose advancement this good money will be used.

History is a many angled mirror in which nations easily see themselves as they wish they were. Especially are political histories prone to convey a grand panorama of wars, rulers and a panoply of other prominent personages, while scant attention if any, is given to the peasant who first fashioned a better hoe or selected a superior fruit or grain variety.

Identifying a broader history is particularly critical in countries like Nepal, which is only recently emerging from feudalism and legally abolished slavery in 1925. Where other nations have had centuries to sift and sort fragments of their past and settle upon an agreed interpretation, modern communications and development demands force a telescoping of decisions. Choices of what is unique, valuable and viable must be made rapidly and will become binding upon the future.

Less than two centuries ago the numerous fiefs of hill rajas along the southern escarpment of the Himalayas were unified by the military mastery of the house of Gurkha. In the 19th century these people, tracing their ethnic origins to Mongols and Tibetans, and to Rajputs and Brahmans from the Indian plains, speaking numerous dialects and holding diverse faiths, were welded into a kingdom. National isolation was sought in order to shield themselves from British-Indian domination from the south and Tibetan-Chinese from the north. Consequently Nepal today, with a population nearing 13 million, ranks among the least modernized nations, with a literacy rate of less than 20 percent.

MAHESH REGMI’S research and translation service, started in 1957, was a new kind of enterprise for Nepal. His weekly Nepal Press Digest has become an effective journal of contemporary reporting within the kingdom. It is a valued source for diplomats in Kathmandu and vital for the United Nations and other organizations seeking to assist in Nepal’s progress. The Regmi Research Series, printed for “private study and research” on a subscription basis, is opening chapters of Nepal’s past to her own and international scholars.

REGMI has also produced three major scholarly works. Land Tenure and Taxation in Nepal was published in four volumes at Berkeley, California, between 1963 and 1968. A Study in Nepali Economic History 1768-1846, detailing the agrarian basis of the society during national unification, appeared in 1971. In 1976 followed Landownership in Nepal, an analysis of the origin and evolution of the rural problems besetting 95 percent of his countrymen.

Born in 1929 into a Nepali family with a scholarly tradition, REGMI was tutored at home by his father until he enrolled at Trichandra College in Kathmandu where he took his bachelor’s degree in 1948. He entered His Majesty’s Government of Nepal in 1951 as Acting Director of Industries and, concurrently for brief periods, of Cottage Industries and the Central Purchase Department, before embarking upon his own venture. In 1961-62 he was Member Secretary of the Royal Taxation and Land Reform commissions. In and out of government service, his commitment has been to understanding, explaining and furthering the lot of the Nepali peasant whose hillside farm beneath the towering Himalayas remains the foundation of Nepalese society.

In electing MAHESH CHANDRA REGMI to receive the 1977 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Journalism, Literature and Creative Communication Arts, the Board of Trustees recognized his chronicling of Nepal’s past and present, enabling his people to discover their origins and delineating national options.

It is with a sense of great humility that I accept the Ramon Magsaysay Award for Journalism, Literature and Creative Communication Arts tonight, for I had never imagined that my work would attract the attention of an institution as prestigious as the Magsaysay Foundation. I can not say I am delighted with this great honor, for my feelings at this moment are deeper and steadier than the exuberance and intensity that the term implies. May I say, therefore, that I feel deeply satisfied.

Let me add, however, that this sense of satisfaction is not due solely to the recognition that has been given to the work to which I have dedicated the past 20 years of my life. That work has brought sufficient recompense in itself. The thrill of exploring the unknown frontiers of knowledge, the occasional exhilaration of being able to fit little-known aspects of the social and economic life of my fellow countrymen into a larger coherent picture, these have been sufficient rewards to me over the years for the wearying and taxing effort that research and writing involve. Moreover, public recognition and acclaim have never had any appeal for me, nor have I ever put pen to paper in the hope of meriting such an award.

For me the Award that you have conferred is valuable mainly because, as the Foundation has graciously noted, my commitment has always been to understanding, explaining, and furthering the lot of the Nepali peasant. Tonight, when I realize that my own personal commitment and concern have been accepted for what they are by the Foundation, I feel deeply satisfied.

There is yet another and still greater source of satisfaction. I am sobered and uplifted by the association with the greatness of spirit, integrity, and devotion to freedom of your late noble and illustrious President, that the Award implies. I have been inspired by what I have read in one of his biographies: “Family love, a profound and simple religious sense, and the love of the country and its people are the component parts of Magsaysay that combine to make him a whole and dedicated human being.” For me, therefore, the real significance of this Ramon Magsaysay Award, this great honor, lies in the inspiration it has given me to try to perfect myself as a whole and dedicated human being by following in the footsteps of that great man.

Among the ironies of modernization in Southeast Asia is the grim fact that at least one-third of all children are more critically malnourished than were their grandparents’ generation.

Urbanization denies families opportunities to gather important foods for their diet. Fish, crab and other seafood, or vegetables and fruits growing semi-wild, are less available to migrants from a rural barrio to the city slums. Shifting from hand-pounded to machine-milled rice costs nutrients as does curtailment of breastfeeding in favor of diluted canned milk.

Malnutrition reduces resistance to disease and in itself is a major cause of illness and death. Respiratory infections, including tuberculosis, and gastrointestinal diseases continue to take a heavy toll among children in the Philippines. Schistosomiasis and malaria, in the remoter provinces where they occur, may, by their incidence and results, be cruel to the young.

FE DEL MUNDO chose to specialize in treating children while attending the College of Medicine at the University of the Philippines where she graduated first in her class of 70 in 1933. Postgraduate studies in pediatrics at Harvard and Columbia Universities led to a residency at Billings Hospital in Chicago and a research fellowship at the Harvard Medical School. Leaving attractive opportunities to remain in America, she returned home on the eve of World War II.

In enemy occupied Manila the petite lady doctor organized a Children’s Home, aided Allied internees in Santo Tomas University premises and directed the Manila Children’s Hospital. After liberation in 1945 she founded and was first Director of the North General Hospital, and she also joined the faculty of Santo Tomas University. For two decades she chaired the Pediatrics Department of Far Eastern University and last year edited a major compendium, Textbook of Pediatrics and Child Health.

The Children’s Medical Center was started in 1957 as a 100-bed hospital on what had been a muddy plot in Quezon City, chiefly through the ingenuity, hard work and prayers of Dr. DEL MUNDO. Donating her own house and property toward the funding, she also established there the Institute of Maternal and Child Health to train doctors, nurses and paramedical personnel. By 1962 teams starting rural rehydration centers were saving lives of infants dying of diarrhea. As international support was mustered these became full-fledged pediatric teams.

Even before the Philippine Government began encouraging population control in the late 1960s Dr. DEL MUNDO had rural units in distant Palawan and her father’s home island of Marinduque teaching health, nutrition and family planning. In 1968, with funds provided through the National Economic Council and the United States Agency for International Development, the Institute established 100 family planning clinics in puericulture centers—within five years these increased to 390. Distinguishing the Institute staff were the enthusiasm with which they enlisted acceptors, their critical assessment of their own shortcomings and careful accounting of their modest resources.

National and international recognition and honors have not caused Dr. DEL MUNDO to slacken her effort nor lose sight of her purpose. The health of children—upon whom the future depends—continues to absorb the now 66 year old “little lady in tennis shoes” as it has for four decades, only today she has enlisted some of the ablest professional talents in the cause.

In electing FE DEL MUNDO to receive the 1977 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Public Service, the Board of Trustees recognizes her lifelong dedication as a physician extraordinary to needy Filipino children.

With joy and deep gratitude, I accept this international Award which I shall always treasure for the great man it honors and for the recognition it gives to the Awardees.

Individuals who learn and derive their inspirations from the lives of others, cannot but draw inspiration from the life of our late President who commanded the respect and deep affection of his people because he was simple, selfless, understanding and humble, cared for people as individuals, and believed in their dignity and importance.

On March 16, 1957, the day before his demise, President Magsaysay, in a brief address at the University of the Visayas in Cebu City, spoke of the “limitless capacity of the Filipino parent for self-abnegation, his readiness to part with his last material possessions, in order that his children may look forward to a better life than it has been his lot to live.”

A number of institutions and organizations and even individuals, strive to enrich the lives of the children of our land, through education, in the sciences and art, through provision of their bare necessities or their needs or even of some amenities. It has been our great privilege to contribute our share to the enhancement of the health and well-being of our children through the Children’s Medical Center Foundation and its social action arm, the Institute of Maternal and Child Health. I am particularly grateful that I should be a 1977 Awardee as November 1977 marks the 20th Anniversary of the Medical Center and the 10th of the Institute of Maternal and Child Health. For this event we are re-editing a book for parents entitled Baby and You in Tagalog and in English, a compilation of a 20-year column in a local Sunday magazine. Earlier this year, the Association of Philippine Medical Colleges officially launched the first Philippine medical textbook entitled Textbook of Pediatrics and Child Health for which it was my privilege to serve as Editor-in-Chief, perhaps a landmark of my 31 years on the faculty of two medical schools in the Philippines.

I am fortunate to have had many occasions to share my opportunities with others. It is a fact that developing countries present numerous problems of which children bear the brunt. The Philippines, as a developing country with 22 million children, presents many challenges, particularly in remote and under-served areas.

Hence in the past 15 years the Medical Center and the Institute have become socially committed and involved, seeking through traditional and innovative approaches to meet some of the health needs of our children. Pediatrics teams were sent to stay and work some months in various provinces where their services were needed. The establishment of 103 rehydration centers in rural communities fortuitously preceded an alarming cholera epidemic. In cooperation with the Training Office of the Department of Health, two-week courses in maternal and child health and family planning were conducted in five regions. We have been able to serve and train others in a variety of community health activities and participate actively in the population program of the administration. Thus today’s occasion gives me a very special harvest of these tangible fruits of my professional life.

To the Board of Trustees, I am most grateful for their generous recognition of services rendered to our people through the children. I am grateful also to my nominator for efforts exerted, but more so for his confidence, faith and trust in me. I take this occasion to thank my parents, my mentors, my co-workers and colleagues for their continued support and encouragement.

As I receive this Award for outstanding service for the public good by a private citizen, I express my humble hope and pray that I shall continue to do all I can to help realize our late President’s wish for the Filipino child, whom he believed had a destiny which transcends the state but also with inalienable duties to render to the state. Our late President’s wish was that the child should grow into an individual capable of exercising the fullest expression and fulfillment, physically and spiritually, of his human personality. It is a very rewarding task to contribute to the building of a world of happy and healthy children of whom the Divine Physician bespoke his concern and affection: “Suffer the little children to come unto me, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.”

The fragility of nature is frequently forgotten in the furious quest for development. As a growing population presses upon the landscape, once verdant hinterlands are denuded. Deprived of their natural habitat, wild birds, animals, fish and reptiles are hunted, netted, trapped in the fires of slash and burn cultivators, killed by insecticides or frightened from reproducing by the noise modern civilization brings.

In the fertile lands of Southeast Asia, this destruction accelerated only recently, and will leave the next generation scant knowledge of a vanishing wilderness. Particularly for urbanites, smog, traffic-packed highways and senses dulled to the dimensions of the natural world, will minimize that opportunity. Without occasional awareness of nature, all humans, in time, will be poorer, narrower persons.

BENJAMIN GALSTAUN came to his zoological calling early. In East Java, Indonesia, where he was born in 1913, this son of an Armenian father and Javanese mother became acquainted as a child with the wildlife of his country. He observed fauna in the lush countryside surrounding the family coffee, tobacco and pineapple estate as well as in the Surabaya zoo which his father helped support. His life-long interest aroused then was sustained during his years working in trading and banking and as a prisoner of war in Japan. In 1946 when the opportunity came to rebuild the war-wrecked zoo of Jakarta, he gladly accepted the difficult job as its Commissioner.

Founded in 1864 by the Flora and Fauna of Batavia Society in the garden of the great painter Raden Saleh, the 10-hectare zoo was crowded by a city that in a century grew from 300,000 to nearly 4,000,000 inhabitants. When the site was selected in 1964 for a new cultural center, GALSTAUN and his wife Henriette—as an unsalaried landscape architect and botanist—worked with municipal authorities to secure for a new zoo an abandoned agricultural school some 20 kilometers southeast of Jakarta. This became the 200-hectare Taman Margasatwa, or “Garden of Wild Animals,” at Ragunan.

Among the zoos of Asia the GALSTAUNs and their associates have made this one unique. Designed to approximate nature, a lake nearly a kilometer in length holds five islands sheltering wildlife. Three pairs of orangutans—literally “men of the forest”—contented in their 6,000 square meter park, have produced 12 offspring; Elephants have a 200 meter long natural promenade. An eight-meter long python loafs in a jungle setting, as do fellow snakes. Even the Giant Komodo—”dragon” lizard from the eastern Sunda Islands—appears at home, as does the black and white long-snouted Sumatran tapir. Sadly missing is the Bali tiger, now extinct.

To this splendid zoo and botanical garden come some 1,500,000 visitors annually—mostly young. Admission fees and other income make the park self-supporting; it has accumulated a 14 million rupiah reserve, though municipal funds are used for capital expansion. While the 245 person staff of Taman Margasatwa care for several thousand species of birds and animals, they also study the unique flora and fauna of Indonesia which, lying on both sides of the Wallace Line, has species characteristic of both the Asian and Australian biogeographic regions.

In electing BENJAMIN GALSTAUN to receive the 1977 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Government Service, the Board of Trustees recognizes his guiding a new generation of Indonesians toward understanding and valuing animals and nature in Asia’s moist tropics.

In receiving this Award I would like to make the following report on the Zoo and Botanical Garden of Jakarta:

In 1976 over 1,500,000 people visited the Jakarta Zoo; this is up from 300,000 five years ago. For the most part these visitors come from Jakarta, but more and more people from other parts of Indonesia are coming to see our collections of plants and animals. Our visitors are mostly from urban areas. The Zoo and Botanical Garden offer them their only contact with “nature.” One of the basic objectives of our zoo program is to give visitors as much insight into the natural world as possible while they are with us.

We attempt to do this in a number of ways. We have available guides that take visitors through the zoo in groups and explain to them about the animals and plants they see along the way. We have provided identification labels for the animals and now we have them for the majority of trees and shrubs. We try to display our animals in ways that show affiliation by taxonomic group and in some cases by community. On our large monkey islands for example, the visitor can see primates living together and moving about in semi-natural situations.

All our staff are involved in local conservation efforts; they are always ready to give talks when asked. In Jakarta there is a growing interest among young people to leave the city and to camp in the country on their holidays. They go as school groups and with organizations such as the Boy Scouts. We try hard to reach these groups and to increase their appreciation of the natural world.

The Zoo’s senior staff contribute to newspapers through articles they have written or by talking with reporters about Zoo matters. We have found these articles to be a major source of information for the public about animals in Indonesia.

We conduct our education program for the Zoo staff on both a formal and informal basis. Informally our curators work with the keepers to increase their working knowledge about the animals in their care. We actively try to involve keepers in the data gathering process, especially in regard to the breeding program and, of course, in matters of animal health.

Our formal program for the staff includes the use of films and lectures by the senior staff and by outside experts. When showing films we include staff and their families so that interest is maintained on that important front.

In summary, we recognize the vital role that zoos play in conservation education in urban areas. We are attempting to meet this obligation with the resources we have available.

In closing, may I extend an invitation to all of you when you visit Jakarta to drop in at the Zoo and Botanical Garden and see the beautiful world of nature. My colleagues over the years, my helpers in the Zoo and Garden, and principally my wife and I would like to convey our appreciation and thanks for the honor that is given us this afternoon. It is a precious moment in our lives to be associated with the name of your great President Ramon Magsaysay.

Except for a few special and usually commercial crops, agriculture in the tropics until recently lagged behind agricultural advances in the temperate zone. Now pressure of population and the world’s most abundant under-used lands with available water compel attention to the 40 degrees of latitude straddling the equator. As tropical agriculture becomes a leading frontier for science, the social and human problems of transforming traditional rural life present an even greater challenge.

As the first university college of agriculture established in the tropics, that of the University of the Philippines at Los Baños had a modest though auspicious beginning. Twelve students and their four teachers in June 1909 started classes in two tents pitched among the scrub of a weed-grown farm below Mount Makiling, 68 kilometers southeast of Manila. These and additional Filipino students, with their American professors, cleared their experimental farm and erected the first thatched bamboo student house.

The mission of the institution was “production of men of superior training in agriculture in the broad sense,” in the words of Charles Fuller Baker who gave the last 15 years of his life as professor and later dean. As a young Filipino faculty emerged—some of whom had started as working-students—and made scientific contributions that won the COLLEGE status, students came also from Thailand, China, Indonesia and India.

The COLLEGE OF AGRICULTURE and its faculty were cruelly hurt by World War II. First a camp for Filipino war prisoners, then an internment camp for Allied nationals and headquarters for the Japanese Army, the campus was also a center for guerrilla resistance to the enemy and their collaborators, as well as a battleground. Driven out by liberating American troops, Japanese soldiers returned and in two days devastated the campus and its invaluable collections and records.

In the reconstruction of the Philippines the COLLEGE, with distinguished entomologist Leopoldo B. Uichanco as dean, played a vital role: its graduates staffed numerous key offices in government and private business, they increasingly led in the work of the new organizations of the United Nations, and the COLLEGE became a test ground in Asia for utilizing assistance from international agencies in the immense task of bringing knowledge to the service of the farmer.

By presidential decree in 1972 the COLLEGE became the core of the new University of the Philippines at Los Baños. Its 235 faculty in nine departments, plus an Institute of Plant Breeding and a National Crop Protection Center, do the majority of agricultural research in the country, at the same time instructing almost 3,000 students, of whom some 800 are in graduate studies. Several hundred foreign students come from Asia, the Middle East, Africa and the Pacific. Today the Los Baños complex also includes a College of Forestry, the International Rice Research Institute, a Southeast Asian Regional Center for Graduate Study and Research in Agriculture, and other innovative institutions.

This “critical mass” of scientific and intellectual talent now confronts a new challenge: that of bridging the intellectual gap between villagers and urbanized decision-makers and educators. A genuine “rural breakthrough,” essential to the future of humanity in the tropics, depends upon effective application of the unique “Los Baños spirit”— dedication, innovation and tenacity.

In electing the COLLEGE OF AGRICULTURE OF THE UNIVERSITY OF THE PHILIPPINES AT LOS BAÑOS to receive the 1977 Ramon Magsaysay Award for International Understanding, the Board of Trustees recognizes its quality of teaching and research, fostering a sharing of knowledge in modernizing Southeast Asian agriculture.

Sixty-eight years ago, on June 14, 1909, the UNIVERSITY OF THE PHILIPPINES COLLEGE OF AGRICULTURE was born at Los Baños, Laguna. Under the leadership of Dean Edwin B. Copeland, 12 Filipino students and four American scientist-educators literally hacked out the COLLEGE from semi-wilderness with the tenacity, innovativeness and camaraderie that have come to be known as the “Los Baños spirit.” Out of these beginnings, and with the same spirit, successive generations of faculty and students have made of the COLLEGE OF AGRICULTURE and of the larger university that has evolved out of it, the productive academic community that it is today.

The College of Forestry branched out of the COLLEGE OF AGRICULTURE in 1916. In the early sixties the Agricultural Credit and Cooperatives Institute and the Dairy Training and Research Institute were created, later to become separate units of the University. Since 1972 the COLLEGE OF AGRICULTURE has undergone much transformation, largely brought about by the creation by presidential decree of an autonomous University of the Philippines at Los Baños (UPLB) under the University of the Philippines System. In addition to the older units, the UPLB now has a Graduate School, College of Sciences and Humanities, Institute of Human Ecology, Institute of Agricultural Development and Administration, Institute of Agricultural Engineering and Technology, Agrarian Reform Institute, Center for Policy and Development Studies, and a National Training Center for Rural Development. The UPLB also has a National Center for Agriculture and Resources Research.

At present the UPLB COLLEGE OF AGRICULTURE retains nine academic departments: Agronomy, Horticulture, Animal Science; Soil Science, Entomology, Plant Pathology, Food Science and Technology, Agricultural Education, and Development Communication. By two presidential decrees it has added within its organization an Institute of Plant Breeding and a National Crop Protection Center. It also has a Sugar Technology Program, the Central Experiment Station, the UP Rural High School and a Research and Training Station in La Granja, Negros Occidental.

In its 68 years the now UPLB COLLEGE OF AGRICULTURE has tried to do its best, and will continue to try to do so, in carrying out its mission of service to country and people and to the region as a whole. Its strength continues to lie in its faculty, other academic and administrative staff, students and alumni who share a deep sense of commitment to national development. Representing these constituencies through the years is the succession of deans of the COLLEGE after Edwin Copeland: Charles F. Baker, Bienvenido M. Gonzalez, Leopoldo B. Uichanco, Francisco O. Santos, Dioscoro L. Umali, Faustino T. Orillo, Fernando A. Bernardo and your humble servant. As the incumbent, I am greatly privileged to receive this recognition today of the COLLEGE OF AGRICULTURE’S cumulative achievements over the years.

I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge the contribution and support to the COLLEGE of our Chancellor of the University of the Philippines at Los Baños, Dr. Abelardo G. Samonte. Likewise, the COLLEGE would not have earned this recognition without the help and cooperation of its sister units in the UPLB. I convey to all of them our sincere appreciation.

I must also say that the COLLEGE OF AGRICULTURE has had excellent cooperation from, and working relationships with, the Department of Agriculture, its National Food and Agriculture Council and various agencies; a number of foreign governments; philanthropic organizations such as the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations; academic institutions such as Cornell University, the Southeast Asian Regional Center for Graduate Study and Research in Agriculture (SEARCA) and the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI); and many other agencies, institutions and organizations, both public and private, local and international.

It is with distinct pleasure that I accept on behalf of the COLLEGE OF AGRICULTURE, UNIVERSITY OF THE PHILIPPINE’s AT LOS BAÑOS, the Ramon Magsaysay Award for International Understanding. My colleagues and I pledge ourselves anew to the service of our fellow beings—especially the many small farmers in the Philippines and in Asia—guided by the spirit of Ramon Magsaysay and his concern for the masses.