Policy Research Helping Provide Affordable Rice to Filipinos

2004 Annual ReportTHE PRESIDENT’S MESSAGEExcellent. This defines the performance of theInstitute in 2004. With almost 400 outputs—thebiggest number since 1978—to its name, theInstitute defined productivity this year by comingout with more research studies, more publications,more seminars, and more media exposure. This isthe Institute’s 27 th year of existence and so far, ithas produced close to 4,000 contributions topolicymaking in various formats.Numbers, in terms of outputs—albeit the fact thatthey are regarded with respect by the Institute andthe research community—are nevertheless renderedinutile if they do not correspond to meaningfulstories to convey and if they do not lead toreforms in mindsets and actual policy decisions.Which is why the Institute—and the research community—considers it a continuing challenge to be ableto interact with key decisionmakers so that the latter can arrive at evidence-based policy decisions.This is the essence of the Institute’s central involvement as coordinator and lead institution in theannual observance of the Development Policy Research Month (DPRM). Linked very closely with thepursuit of its mandate to produce and disseminate policy studies, the Institute—in celebration of thesecond year of the DPRM in 2004—made the rounds of television and radio shows and discussed theimportance of policy research to a country that has a path to pursue. Our economy has been somewhatweakened by the uproar of the election aftermath. Everyone wants to be heard and be proclaimed thevictor. Everyone seems to indicate that he or she has the exact medicine for the political and economicails of the country. Without laying claims to having any of such kind of medicine, what the Institute,together with the rest of the research group, simply wishes to stress, though—through its researchoutputs—is that it would be a welcome turn for the nation to follow a well-researched and wellgroundeddirection to economic recuperation.The Institute thus takes on the responsibility of generating rigorous researches. And lives for this goal.This is the story behind our stories.MARIO B. LAMBERTE, Ph.D.Presidentiii