The Asian NGO Coalition for Agrarian Reform and Rural Development (ANGOC) turns 20 this year. As often happens in anniversaries, we will give ourselves over to the rituals that mark the passing of many years. As with people, so with organizations.

We might take out the old pictures, search the faces for our own, and laugh, when we find it, at the way we looked 20 years ago. (“Were we ever that young?”, we will say, along with the unspoken “If only we were.”)

We will certainly troop to that favorite haunt (if the budget allows) or gather round the conference table (if it doesn’t) to assess two decades worth of work, congratulating ourselves on this one, cursing ourselves on that one.

Then comes that part of the agenda that will distinguish this observance from the merely ritualistic. We will turn on the lights inside. We will search our conscience. We will scour the stuff that makes up our present, the plans we’re making for the future, for traces of promises made in the past.

And what better anchor to those promises than declarations of them committed to paper? Hence, our offering for our 20th Anniversary: four volumes of papers, statements, and speeches made in the last 20 years on issues which comprise ANGOC’s major concerns: Sustainable Agriculture and Food Security (Volume I); Agrarian Reform and Resource Rights (Volume II); Environment and Sustainable Development (Volume III); and Civil Society and People’s Participation (Volume IV).

Volume 1 is off the press and Volume 2 is slated to come out in the second quarter of the year. The other two volumes will be released in separate installments there after.