Introduction

Eric Malcolm McGaw — known to colleagues across four continents and to a generation of Hyderabad runners simply as Digit — spent his life in service of a single, stubbornly hopeful idea: that better communication could help feed the world.

Born on 4 October 1948, Eric was an American who lived and worked in the developing world for over forty years. His professional life was built around translating the complex, often invisible work of agricultural science into stories that donors, NGOs, governments, and farmers could actually use. It is not glamorous work. It does not produce headlines. But without it, breakthroughs in drought-tolerant pigeonpea, in pearl millet hybrids, in dryland farming systems across Africa and Asia stay locked in academic journals and never reach the people whose lives depend on them. Eric understood this, and he made it his mission.

He was married to Elena Ilarde McGaw, a Filipina from Looc, Cebu, whom he met in Manila around 1979 or 1980 and married in 1981. Elena was his partner across forty years and four continents — at the oars in the Philippines, on the trails in Hyderabad, in the diplomatic listings in Ghana, and at his side in Looc when his life ended where her life had begun. The story of his life is, from the moment they met, also the story of theirs.

Beginnings

Eric grew up in New England, the son of David E. McGaw, the second of four brothers — Doug, Eric, Philip, and Andrew. His childhood was lived in part above treeline. The McGaws were a hiking family: father, sons, and the family dog Frisky climbed the White Mountains together, and somewhere in the late 1950s or 1960s, all six of them — David, Doug, Eric, Philip, Andrew, and Frisky — were inducted as members of the Appalachian Mountain Club's Four-Thousand-Footer Club, having between them summited every one of New Hampshire's 48 peaks over four thousand feet. The journal Appalachia recorded their completion on page 166, in the September entry of that year, when total membership in the club still stood at 129.

Doug, Eric, Phil, and Andy McGaw (c 1965)

The list of those 48 peaks is unforgiving — Washington, Adams, Jefferson, the Bonds, Owl's Head, Isolation, the whole northern Presidential range — and the achievement was the work of years. Frisky's name appears alongside the McGaw men's, as the AMC has always honoured the dogs who walked the miles too.

Atop the Smokies (c 1960)

Years later, Eric's own three children — Tucker, John, and Rachel — would each in turn complete the 48 themselves and be inducted into the same club, in the same journal, on the same mountains their father and grandfather had climbed before them. Three generations of McGaws are now on the AMC's permanent rolls. The mountains were a family inheritance, passed down hike by hike.

It was the beginning of a body that would never be still. The boy who climbed the 48 with his father and brothers became the rower on the Pasig River, the founder of a running club in Hyderabad, the sailor of an improbable boat on a city lake. The mountains were where he started — and where, through his children, he continues.

Underwater, and Onto Dry Land

Eric (c 1980, Brunei)

Before Eric was an editor, he was a diver. He worked as a professional dive master in Brunei and the Philippines, and his expertise was substantial enough to be sought out across institutions: in Marine Archaeology, edited by G. Kuppuram, an author writing about a frightening underwater encounter with a sea snake reaches for an authoritative voice and quotes Eric by name on the behavior of hydrophiid sea snakes — "Professional diver Eric McGaw (pers. comm.) has dived around sea snakes in Asian marine waters for years. He has never known one to attack a diver." In October 1987, the Tampa Bay chapter of the Society of American Military Engineers invited him to address their members on the subject of commercial diving — the kind of speaking engagement that comes when a professional society treats your knowledge as worth the room's time.

Barry Redford with Eric McGaw (c 1981, Brunei)

When Tucker was small, before John was born, Eric was working off an oil rig. The pay was extraordinary. The danger was extraordinary too — commercial saturation diving in the early 1980s, before the era of remotely operated vehicles, asked human bodies to do work that human bodies were not entirely built for. Elena asked him to stop. She had married a diver. She had not married a man who was going to leave his children fatherless because the next dive went wrong. He stopped. He came up onto dry land for good.

He took a job in agricultural communications, first at the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in Los Baños and then at the Asian Development Bank (ADB) in Manila — two of the great research institutions of the Philippines, both of which would credit him for years afterward as an editor and communicator. ICRISAT hired him in 1989, summarising his background in their staff announcement as bringing "considerable experience in the use of audio-visual aids" — the period's term for the kind of visual communications work that would define the rest of his career. The family moved to India.

It is worth pausing to register the arc. The man who would go on to co-author chapters with the Director General of ICRISAT, to be quoted in international magazines on the agricultural reconstruction of Rwanda, and to be photographed standing alongside Norman Borlaug and Kofi Annan, had begun his professional life beneath the surface of the South China Sea. He came to agricultural science as a man who had spent years watching the natural world up close, in difficult conditions, and learning to interpret what he saw. That was the same skill, applied differently.

A Career Across Three Continents

Eric spent the heart of his career at the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) in Patancheru, near Hyderabad. He joined as Research Editor in 1989 — the move that brought the family from the Philippines to India — and became Public Awareness Officer from 1992 to 1997. After that, he worked independently for a time under his own banner, McGaw Associates, taking on substantial communications work for ICRISAT itself among other clients — work good enough that the institute eventually hired him back onto staff. He stayed for the rest of the family's Hyderabad years, serving as Head of Communications in what was then the Project Development and Marketing Office from 2001 to 2004, and later as Head of Information Services — the role he held when Dr Norman Borlaug visited ICRISAT in 2006. In 1996, his work earned two awards from Agricultural Communicators in Education (ACE): a Silver award for the writing series Food for Thought and a Gold award for a Four Color Special Report on ICRISAT's Southern and Eastern Africa programme.

Eric at ICRISAT (Dec, 1989)

In 2004, Eric was credited as co-author, alongside ICRISAT Director General William D. Dar and the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center's D. V. R. Reddy, of A Grey to Green Revolution in the Semi-Arid Tropics of Asia and Africa — a chapter in a Crop Science Society of America Special Publication. The "Grey to Green" framework set out the institutional vision that defined ICRISAT under Dar's fifteen-year leadership: not the elimination of environmental diversity, but adapting agriculture to the variable, harsh, low-investment realities of the world's drylands. To be co-author with the Director General on the foundational articulation of an institute's mission is unusual. It speaks to a writer who was trusted at the centre of how ICRISAT understood and described itself.

His communications work at ICRISAT extended well beyond the institute's own crops and continents. In the mid-1990s, when International Agricultural Development magazine — the trade publication of record for global development work — covered the agricultural reconstruction of Rwanda after the 1994 genocide, Eric was the expert they quoted by name on the state of the country's fields. "A lot of fields are sitting there untended," he told the magazine, in a piece about the CGIAR network's collaboration with the Rwandan Institute of Agricultural Research to rebuild seed systems in a country devastated by atrocity. It was the kind of work that did not produce headlines and that no one ever really wins awards for — but in that small quotation, in a niche professional publication, you can hear the work he had spent his life doing: standing at the seam between scientists who knew things and a world that needed to understand them, in the worst circumstances imaginable.

After ICRISAT, the family's work and life moved with him. He joined the International Center for Biosaline Agriculture (ICBA) in Dubai, where his name appears on the core team in successive Annual Reports. The work at ICBA — figuring out how to grow crops in the salinity-stressed margins where conventional agriculture fails — was a natural extension of the dryland focus of his ICRISAT years.

From the United Arab Emirates, his career took him to Africa, where he spent years working on what may have been the most ambitious agricultural challenge of his life: helping Africa feed itself. He joined the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) in Nairobi — the African-led institution founded in 2006 with backing from the Rockefeller Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and chaired in its early years by former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan. Eric met Annan in person in Ghana, and the photograph he took of Annan with his colleague Jeff Haskins is preserved in the ILRI news archive as part of the public record of those years. From Nairobi, the family then moved on to Accra, Ghana, where Eric joined the Forum for Agricultural Research in Africa (FARA), the technical arm of the African Union Commission on agricultural science. His role at FARA was Communications and Public Awareness Specialist — formally registered on the Ghana Diplomatic List, where Mr. and Mrs. McGaw appeared together among the accredited international organization staff resident in the country.

After his years in Africa, Eric and Elena returned to where the family's story had begun: Manila.

Across the whole arc — Hyderabad, Dubai, Nairobi, Accra, Manila — the work was always the same. Translating science into something that could change a farmer's life. Communicating across continents and languages and disciplines.

Beyond his core appointments, Eric's hand can be found in the pages of an extraordinary range of organisations devoted to agriculture and development: the World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF), the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR), the Global Forum for Rural Advisory Services (GFRAS), the International Water Management Institute (IWMI), the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), and the Global Forum on Agricultural Research and Innovation (GFAR), where he was listed as a recognised expert. Much of the most important communications work in development is, by its nature, uncredited: the press release that gets a project funded, the photograph that ends up on a donor's desk, the editing that turns a researcher's draft into something a minister will read.

The Annual Reports

From 1990 through 2005, Eric was part of the Information Services team that produced ICRISAT's Annual Report — the institute's flagship publication, the document by which donors, governments, and partners across the world came to understand what ICRISAT was, what it did, and why it mattered. The annual reports were always a team effort, with the whole Information Services group pitching in year after year. Eric's role on that team shifted as his own career did: he contributed as Research Editor in the early years, as Public Awareness Officer through the 1990s, and as Head of Communications and then Head of Information Services into the 2000s.

ICRISAT field, (c 1990)

Read in sequence, the Annual Report titles are a chronicle of an institute finding and articulating its purpose. ICRISAT Now Sowing for the Future in 1993. Grey to Green Revolution in 2001 — the year the framework that would define ICRISAT's vision under William Dar's leadership found its name. Research for Impact in 2002. Building a Strong ICRISAT in 2003. Sowing Seeds of Success in 2004. Germinating the seeds of success in the semi-arid tropics in 2005. These titles weren't just covers. They were the framings under which the institute's work was understood and remembered. Eric was part of the team that helped name the era he served in.

Behind the Camera

Eric was, throughout his career, also a working photographer. His images appeared in publications by the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research, the Forum for Agricultural Research in Africa, the Global Forum for Rural Advisory Services, ICRISAT, ILRI, and trade publications including Appropriate Technology and Agrinews — where he was also listed as the press contact for ICRISAT stories on biological pest control, the door reporters around the world knocked on for ICRISAT science.

Two photographs from his career are worth pausing on, because of who is in them.

In 2006, during a visit by Dr Norman Borlaug to ICRISAT headquarters in Patancheru, a photograph was taken of Eric — then Head of Information Services — with Borlaug himself. Norman Borlaug was the father of the Green Revolution, recipient of the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize, and the agricultural scientist whose work is credited with saving more human lives than perhaps any other in the twentieth century.

A few years later, during Eric's years with the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) and the Forum for Agricultural Research in Africa (FARA), he met Kofi Annan in Ghana. Annan — former UN Secretary-General, Nobel Peace Prize laureate himself, and the founding chair of AGRA — was the public face of an effort to bring the Green Revolution's promise to Africa, half a century after Borlaug had first carried it to Asia and Latin America. Eric photographed Annan with their colleague Jeff Haskins, the brilliant young agricultural communications strategist who served the entire CGIAR network. ILRI later used that photograph in their tribute when Haskins died unexpectedly in 2012. It is preserved in the ILRI news archive.

Borlaug and Annan. The man who started the Green Revolution, and the man trying to bring it to Africa. Eric stood with both of them.

Beyond those two encounters, Eric's photographic record includes the Seeds of Life project in East Timor — agricultural recovery in a newly independent nation — where eight of his frames were published in the ACIAR project record. FARA Week 2010 in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, where his images of ILRI Director General Carlos Seré, CGIAR Director Ren Wang, and other senior figures became part of FARA's and ILRI's permanent archives. A 2011 GFRAS conference in Nairobi, where he photographed Jeff Haskins alone — a frame that, less than a year later, would become part of how that community remembered him.

The photographs in the gallery below are a small sampling of his archive.

Manila Boat Club and the Philippine Rowing Years

Long before he was known to Hyderabad's runners as Digit, Eric was an oarsman. Through the 1980s, he and Elena were at the heart of the Manila Boat Club — the oldest sport club in the Philippines, founded in 1895 — where Eric served as Boat Captain. To this day, an MBC shell carries the name E&E McGaw, in honour of Eric and Elena.

For the McGaws, MBC was a family world. Eric raced in regattas alongside Elena's brother Armando Ilarde and Armando's wife Luzvilla, and against close family friends like Malcolm Lambert. A photograph from a two-day regatta at Lake Caliraya — where the club had escaped the pollution of the Pasig River for the weekend — survives in the Manila Standard archive: Eric racing in the surf skiff veteran class, the Ilardes winning the canoe veterans event as a mixed pair. Eric and Elena raced together as a pair too, most often in the Jacquest, a two-man scull. In a March 1988 Qantas Cup race at MBC Sta. Ana, the McGaws finished third in the 1,000-metre handicap event, in a field that included Benjie Ramos's own crew. For the people in it, MBC was never only a club. It was where a large, close-knit Filipino-American family spent its weekends.

When the Manila Boat Club ran free rowing clinics open to the public — as it did in January 1989, ahead of a new racing season — it was Eric, as Boat Captain, who was quoted in the papers, inviting anyone interested in the sport to come down and try.

The McGaws' time at MBC coincided with one of the most pivotal stretches in Philippine rowing history. In 1985, the Amateur Rowing Association of the Philippines (ARAP) was formally organised, with MBC's Benjie Ramos — a close family friend, and godfather to the McGaws' son John — elected as its first president. ARAP was accredited by the Philippine Olympic Committee the following year and admitted to the International Rowing Federation (FISA) in 1988.

These were not abstract milestones. In 1987, in the run-up to the 14th Southeast Asian Games in Jakarta, the Philippine national rowing team had no boats of its own. The country's Gintong Alay sports funding programme had not provided the equipment Filipino rowers needed to compete internationally. ARAP's response was to lean on the Manila Boat Club: Filipino oarsmen rowed at the SEA Games in MBC boats, with MBC oars and gear, donated by the club for the country's use. As MBC Boat Captain, Eric was responsible for the boats that made it possible. The men who went to Jakarta brought home two silver and two bronze medals.

Elena had been selected for the same Philippine team at those 1987 SEA Games but had to withdraw — she was pregnant. By April 1988 she was back on the water, named to the ARAP team for the Hong Kong Rowing Championships under team captain Benjie Ramos, where she raced in the open lightweight women's singles and beat the Shanghai entry in her heat. Eric, MBC's Boat Captain, travelled with the team and raced too, in the men's lightweight fours alongside Alfie Reyes, Henry Reyes, and Cabanilla — a Filipino crew that the Manila Standard, reporting from Shatin, described as having "comfortably overcome cold weather and disturbed water" to dominate their heats.

In 1989, after the family had moved to India for Eric's work at ICRISAT, Eric and Elena travelled back across Asia to Chandigarh to compete at the 3rd Asian Rowing Championships, held at the Sukhna Lake course at the foot of the Shivalik Hills. They were among the first to represent the Philippines at a continental rowing championship under the country's newly recognised national federation. A family video of that era — including footage from the May 1989 President's Cup at MBC — survives, and the Manila Boat Club has shared it on their own website as part of the club's historical record.

When Eric died in 2016, the Manila Boat Club posted a note on their website. "Eric was one of those people we are blessed to have known. His enormous enthusiasm for life and loyalty to friends knew no bounds. He was a legend in his own lifetime within the Hash Harriers and Rowing communities of the world."

Manila, 1979

Sometime in 1979 or 1980 — the exact date is not in our records, which is the way of the most important moments in any family's history — Eric met Elena Ilarde in Manila.

He was an American in his early thirties, a professional dive master who had been working in Brunei and the Philippines for several years, on his way out of the water and into the editorial career that would define the rest of his life. She was a young Filipina from Looc, Cebu, of the Ilarde family — a brother, Armando, would become Eric's regular rowing partner, alongside Armando's wife Luzvilla, in the regattas at the Manila Boat Club.

They were married in 1981. Their first child, Tucker, was born in 1983. A second, John — with Benjie Ramos, Eric's MBC clubmate and the founding president of the Amateur Rowing Association of the Philippines, as godfather — followed. By the time the family left Manila for Hyderabad in 1989, the McGaws were a Filipino-American household of four, anchored on both sides of Elena's family and Eric's professional world. Their third child, Rachel, would be born four years later, in Hyderabad, in 1993 — the only one of the three with India on her birth certificate.

The marriage was a partnership in the fullest sense. They raced together as a pair in the Jacquest, their two-man scull, and an MBC shell still bears their joint name E&E McGaw in their honor. Elena was selected for the Philippine national team for the 1987 Southeast Asian Games in Jakarta, and withdrew only because she was pregnant; she was back on the water by April 1988, racing the lightweight singles at the Hong Kong Championships, where she beat the Shanghai entry in her heat. She and Eric represented the Philippines together at the 1989 Asian Rowing Championships at Sukhna Lake in Chandigarh, just months after the family had moved to India for Eric's work at ICRISAT.

Across the decades that followed — Hyderabad, Dubai, Nairobi, Accra, and finally back to Manila — Mr. and Mrs. McGaw appeared together: in regatta entries, on diplomatic lists, in family photographs across four continents. Eric ended his life in Looc, Cebu, in March 2016, in Elena's hometown, with Elena beside him. He had come home, in the deepest sense — to the place his wife was from, to the family he had married into nearly thirty-five years earlier.

Hussain Sagar and the Banana Split

The move to Hyderabad did not put Eric on dry land for long. Through the 1990s, the McGaws were active at the Secunderabad Club's Sailing Annexe — one of the oldest sailing clubs in India, dating to 1878, set on the shore of Hussain Sagar, the great heart-shaped lake that divides Hyderabad from Secunderabad. Eric kept his sculls there. The family kept something else there too: a yellow Hobie Cat 16, the first ever brought into India, sailed on a landlocked lake in the middle of a South Indian city. We called it Banana Split.

Banana Split, (c. Jul, 1991)

Sailing Club

It is the kind of detail that captured Eric's whole approach to life. The technically improbable thing — an ocean-going catamaran on a freshwater city lake — was not a problem to be argued with. It was a thing to be sailed.

The Hyderabad Hash House Harriers

In March 1990, alongside the founding of sister chapters in Bangalore and Madras, Eric established the Hyderabad Hash House Harriers — H3 — a "drinking club with a running problem" in the international Hash tradition that began in Kuala Lumpur in 1938. Business India magazine was reporting on the new club within months of its first run, quoting Eric about the strange sight of a hundred-odd executives running through Indian city streets shouting "On, on!" By the end of its first year, H3 had thirty-five members, half of them local Indian executives — a quietly bilingual community in a sport that had until then been mostly an expatriate one.

Twelve years later, that small community he had seeded in 1990 hosted the world. In 2002, India held the 13th World Interhash — the biennial gathering of Hashers from kennels around the globe — for the first time, in Goa. Eric was its Chairman. The slogan was "It's a Goa!" The Economic Times covered the run-up. Kingfisher, the Indian beer that had sponsored the Indian Hashes for years, marked the occasion by customising its cans for the first time ever — manufactured in Germany specifically for the event. The McGaw family kept one of the cans as a souvenir.

Read the full story of Interhash Goa 2002 in the dedicated post.

More than three decades later, the Hyderabad Hash still meets almost every Sunday to chase trails laid through the rocky landscape around the city. The kennel Eric founded honours him with the title of GM Emeritus — Grandmaster Emeritus — a permanent recognition of the man who started the whole thing. Eric's son Tucker — Hashname Fast Food — runs with them. Generations of Hyderabad expats and locals have laced up their shoes because of something Eric started. To them, he was not Eric the communications head, or Eric the Boat Captain, or Eric the diver. He was simply Digit.

Warden for the United States

Long before a US Consulate opened in Hyderabad in 2008, the city's American expatriate community relied on a quieter form of representation: a designated Warden, a private American citizen who served as the local link to the US Embassy in New Delhi and the consulate in Chennai. For years, Eric was that person for Hyderabad. The role was unpaid and largely unseen — it meant being on call for emergencies, helping Americans navigate a crisis, and serving as a steady point of contact between a scattered expatriate community and a distant embassy.

His service was significant enough that, before his retirement from the role, he received a personal letter of thanks from the US Ambassador. The letter is somewhere in our family's archives. Eric never made anything of it.

Family

He was married to Elena McGaw, who shared his life of travel and service across continents — at the oars in Manila, on the water at Hussain Sagar, on the trails around Hyderabad. He was father to Tucker, John, and Rachel — the children whose own globetrotting lives he helped shape, who climbed his mountains, and who continue running his trails.

Eric passed away on 3 March 2016 in Looc, Cebu — Elena's hometown — from respiratory failure brought on by amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). He had come home.

He left behind a body of work scattered across hundreds of publications, a running club still going strong in his adopted city, photographs in archives on three continents, a yellow boat that should not have been there, and a family that loved him dearly.

In his memory, the McGaw family supports ALS research and the search for treatments and a cure. ALS took him from us slowly, and it is taking others. If this page reaches someone living through the same fight, please know you are not alone.

This page is a small attempt to gather some of his life in one place — a quiet corner of the internet for a man who spent his life giving voice to others.

List of Publications

Contributions/Attributions

ICRISAT Annual Reports

References

The Ghana Diplomatic List. Entry for Mr. Eric McGaw, Communications and Public Awareness Specialist (United States of America), with Mrs. Elena McGaw, p. 122.

"At ICRISAT" (1989). ICRISAT staff announcement introducing Eric McGaw, formerly of the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) and the Asian Development Bank (ADB) in the Philippines.

Eric McGaw quoted on the agricultural reconstruction of Rwanda. International Agricultural Development magazine, p. 15.

Revenge is sweet! Appropriate Technology magazine. Story by Sarah Reynolds on ICRISAT's biological control of podborers; photographs by Eric McGaw.

Agrinews — ICRISAT story on NPV biological control, with press contact listed as Eric McGaw, ICRISAT Asia Centre, Patancheru.

CIFOR News, Issues 40-44 (Center for International Forestry Research, 2006).

Manila Standard newspaper archive (Philippine rowing years)

Photographic Credits

Photograph Library

Published: Seeds of Life–East Timor

Published: Seeds of Life–East Timor

Published: Seeds of Life–East Timor

Published: Seeds of Life–East Timor

Published: Seeds of Life–East Timor

Published: Seeds of Life–East Timor

Published: Seeds of Life–East Timor

Published: Seeds of Life–East Timor

Published: Seeds of Life–East Timor

With ICRISAT Head of Information Services Eric McGaw (2006, submitted by Genvieve Renard)

Global Forum for Rural Advisory Services (GFRAS)

Global Forum for Rural Advisory Services (GFRAS)

ILRI Director General Carlos Seré with CGIAR Director Ren Wang at FARA Week 2010, held in Ougadougou, Burkina Faso (photo credit: Eric McGaw)

ILRI Director General Carlos Seré at the exhibits at FARA Week 2010, held in Ougadougou, Burkina Faso (photo credit: Eric McGaw)

Carlos Seré and other participants at FARA Week 2010, held in Ougadougou, Burkina Faso (photo credit FARA/McGaw).