 That's our owner to have our DG give us the last visit. Right now, I would like to invite our step-in DG to interview the interaction of our retirement DG. It's a pleasure to be introducing a special seminar today. Before I do, I'd just like to welcome some guests visiting early today. So from the rural broadcasters of the Department of Agriculture, a big welcome. And also a special welcome to our Global Rice Science partnership writing teams from Africa Rice, Seattle, Jerkis, IRD, and... Syracuse. Syracuse, sorry. Okay. So it is, of course, folks, the 10th and last day here at IRD at Los Benos. And it's a great honour to have given us his reflections on 10 years as a DG. For those who are new to IRD, may not be right across North Korea. He was a graduate of the University of Illinois, of Oregon State, and finally of Cornell. Bob's career is punctuated by his commitment for research for development. So he spent time in DRC Democratic Republic of Congo, in Burundi, in Colombia, and also in Kansas. Thank you. Thank you. Of course, Bob spent six years here as he had in the irrigated rice program in the early 1990s and since 2005 as DG. The last few months have brought a flurry of awards. So we're going to read out a few of the prestigious awards that Bob has received, which come from our partners in recognition of the contributions and the standing that Bob has in the field. So the most prestigious award near Philippines, the Order of Secret Tuna, the rank of Zatu, with gold distinction on the Philippines, which is the highest ranked civilian country in this country. I've also recently received a Doctor of Science from a very strong collaborator of the University of Agricultural Technology in the world of Nashua. And Bob was elected a fellow of the National Academy of Agricultural Sciences in India as well. In a recent trip to Vietnam, Bob received a medal recognising his work for the cause of development of Vietnam from the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development. So a number of various significant and well-known awards. So congratulations. This end of year talk from the DG described as a state-of-the-union address here in Nigeria. And I did a bit of reading about the state-of-the-union address in the US. And it's really actually only a relatively recent phenomenon. It used to be a report, a written report that the President had sent to the Congress and everyone was supposed to read it. But along came radio and television. And the President thought, well, this is actually a pretty good opportunity to get a bit of publicity. And so it turned into what we know today are a grand piece of theatre in which the President can bypass the Congress and talk directly to the people, to politic for whatever cause is uppermost in their mind. So of course, the parallel here here is that you don't have to rely on DVDs to get the message. You don't have to rely on division heads or OU heads for the DG and for directly to the people. So it's your chance for the last chance for a fantastic opportunity to have your wisdom and reflections on the last country. So I'd like everyone to stand up because one of the traditions of the state-of-the-union is that you always start with a standing ovation. It ends up just on my party. Thank you very much, Matthew. It really is a pleasure for me to be able to have a last session with all of you. And it really is reflections. I'm not going to make any attempt to go through and put together a summary of all of you accomplished over the last ten years or so, but I will refer to a lot of the progress. But I do want to leave you all with a sense of how significant the work is that we do, how important it is and how important all of your contributions is. It's not something to be taken lightly. So my first message is I want to thank you. I want to thank all of you for all that you've done, all that you've made possible. You've made my job as a director general. You've made huge contributions individually and as a group towards the cause of global food security and reduction of poverty and hunger improving lives and well-being of millions, if not ultimately hundreds of millions of people in the world. I'm deeply, deeply grateful for having had the opportunity to be at the helm. But you guys were the ones who really did all of it. Thank you. You guys were the ones who really, really did all of it. Oh, I was going to mention that, yeah, I actually did take that photograph. I did it on my phone. CPS stitched a few pants together, but yes, that is my photograph. That's why there's no attitude. Here we have done enormous things. But the point I want to make is that our contributions to reduction of hunger and poverty, sustainable rights for our environment is impossible without partnerships. Partnerships in the Philippines, Department of Agriculture, and the Philharyses, unbelievably important, our national partners have to just be mentioned and our international partners. The risk-riding group is here. I think it's just a wonderful belief. Anything that we talk about really has been done. Okay, so how do we get where we are today while we actually plan? We sat down shortly after our ride and we put together a strategic plan. And that strategic plan was driven by a vision, and that vision was fairly succinctly put forth. It's a strong, vibrant, creative and energetic institution that is, I hope, synonymous with scientific excellence and absolutely critical to the world's commitment to eliminating the scourges of hunger and poverty. Basically what that means is that here is contribution will be absolutely essential to achieving that vision. That's what has been guiding us for the last decade. And what does it mean? That means that our work had to make a difference. It's the work that really was critical to the kind of things we want to achieve. That meant that we would be a leader, that we would be doing things that nobody else could actually expect of you. And we would be the ones making the difference. And I asked the question at the very beginning when we created this video. If we can't do this, then why should there be ingredients? So, a lot of people accuse me in the area of being arrogant because making claims of global impact is not a small thing, right? And I say, it's not arrogance. I say, this is what's expected of us. And it's expected of us based on past performance. And here's a cartoon that was in the straight times from Singapore in 2009. If you can't read that already down there, that's the International Life Research Institute. Where the leading newspapers in Southeast Asia puts on a territorial page a picture that the world, the fate of the world's rice and food security is on various shoulders. I noticed the guys were already shy there, but I've never seen them. And that expectation was from the Green Revolution, the first Green Revolution, where we threw a series of innovations around a new rice plant type, a semi-dwarf, in a world where yields were a ton and a half a hectare. Why spread France around Asia would predict it? It was expected that in the 1970s and 80s and 90s, Asia would be facing wave after wave of families in starvation, social upheaval. The future was sub-scenario of that. Well, not everybody bought into that scenario of the future. And here it was created. And it was basically an approach to say, okay, we can change the world by addressing, head on, the limitations of its private real estate. And basically, it was science doing what people said couldn't be done. And that's basically what we're coming from at here. And these guys who were doing that work were real mavericks, the skinny guy on the dyke and Peter Jagger, my mentor. He was the first plant breeder at Erie. He hired Gerdeb Kush. He created the gene bank. He curated the gene bank for seven years. He made the innovations that made the rice crossing possible. He and his colleagues came from around the world. I still say a touch of humor today. He's a crotchety old bird, but he taught me a lot. Tremendous amount. These people took risks. They came from all around the world, came to Erie to work to transform the world. And there was absolutely no assurance they were going to succeed. They took risks. And I think this slide says it all in many ways that we should not shy away from risk. For those of you who can't quite see that picture, it's a little baby brushing the head of a Burmese eyeball, I think. And research institutions are all up. If you don't take the risks, you will never succeed. But if you take risks, it's guaranteed that at certain times you'll fail. And you have to accept that failure. Some people say you have to be a successful research institution. You have to celebrate failure. I think celebrations are a little bit impossible. You certainly have to understand if failure will occur, and then you should learn from it. And I don't think it's possible to make really important progress without taking risks and without risking failure. But failure to be a learning experience means that you have to have a well-designed experiment to know what kind of questions you're asking. So although we embrace failure, when we accept that failure will be a part of our future, that doesn't mean that our work will slide. It means that we structure our work and then we look at it and it doesn't quite work out the way we want it to work, the way it has. Now a key lesson I've learned a number of times is that if you don't have a culture that accepts failure, you put the institute or any organization in extreme risk. Because people will then hide failure, they'll hide mistakes and keep things away from you. And then you're in serious trouble. So don't be afraid of risk, don't be afraid of failure, and don't be afraid of admitting when things didn't work out the way they were going. Somewhat, fantastic example. We'll talk about it a little bit later. But this was something that we went on from 1978, failure after failure, things went wrong, we didn't interpret things right. Well, even when things looked good, we weren't sure if it was going to work. But ultimately, because we'll talk to you later today, the new plant pipe, heralded as a great revolution, actually didn't work out all that well, but wasn't a failure. Well, I don't think so. Because the architecture of the new plant pipe actually served as the framework for the Chinese superhybrid and gave birth to the C4 rice program. The failure of the new plant pipe, how do you feel all those grains? Well, maybe we have to change the nature of the rice. That's what I mean by learning from failure. You should be able to move forward. But if you're going to take risks, if you're going to accept failure, you're going to make claims about bringing hope and improving lives, you're going to have to be accountable. Did we do what we said we were going to do? And did we get what you say we said we were going to get? And that's an extremely important thing to keep in mind. We didn't take our strategic plan while some of us did, maybe, and write it and put it on the shelf and stop thinking about how to copy on my desk. It's been there for the last 10 years. So are we bringing hope? Have we improved lives? So I'll avoid those questions and ask the obvious question, what is rice? This is called classic deflection. No, I want to remind us again how important it is what we're doing and what the context of what improving lives is and what is bringing hope. And it is, as we know, diversity on a crop. Our gene bank is just a miracle every time you look at what's available. But I want to emphasize and keep emphasizing this is critically important that all of us understand, all of our donors understand that rice is not simply a food, it's not a crop. It's the life being of half the world's population. People, if they suffer a shortage of rice, it's an existential challenge. And also, it grows where nothing else wants to grow. Asia during half the year, the only crop you can grow is rice. It's the food, most important food to the world, most of the world's poor. It's the most important food, and I'll talk about, important with a capital I, a case I, the half the world's population, and it grows for what, for any other crop, are miserable conditions. So rice is here to stay. It's going to be very important and it's up to us to make sure that it continues to play until the moment. And something that I want to remind you of, and I really was delighted to see this article came out in May 2014 in the journal Science, because I've been talking about how important rice is and it's a valuable cultural center point for half the world's population. They did a study where they showed that the cultural differences between societies that depend on rice and those that depend on another major cereal are profound. The differences are profound. Rice communities, rice cultures tend to be collaborative. They tend to see carboning. And the reason is that in order to grow a rice crop in interrogation and in drainage and in teams to transplant and in teams to harvest, et cetera, the whole rice culture that's developed over the last 10,000 years is unique in the world. And that's something else to keep in mind. And it's not just rice farmers. It's rice growers who do our life. This is a cultural value that will continue for generations even as we organize. And I was struck by this picture on the international, cover of the international, front page of the international, a couple of years ago, this growing Chinese family, and you're not, you know, China, the great wealthy country, right? But there's an awful lot of poverty still there. And there they are, heating their tea over a fire. They've got one light bulb and the other thing they have is a rice quarter. You get a little money. The first thing you do is you go out and buy a rice quarter. So I thought it was pretty interesting. Rice consumption around the world, obviously, in Asia, both of the rice consumption, dramatically increasing rice consumption in Sub-Saharan Africa. Africa will become the, it is the consumption of rice in Sub-Saharan Africa is faster than anywhere else in the world. Marco O'Brien likes to say we can double rice production in ten years and we'll still be importing the same amount of rice. We look at the concentration of poverty in rice growing areas. Each of those dots stands for a quarter million people who are hungry. I'm sorry, who are desperately poor, less than a dollar in a quarter of U.S. a day. Anything you want to do about poverty, you're going to be looking at rice growing areas. And what is, we talk about poverty, it's not just per capita and income. This is a picture I took when I was working up in Bangladesh in the mid-90s up in the Bahrain Track in Northwest Bangladesh. I told some of you this story about how we get it. The driver along the road and looking out in the field with all these piles of dirt out in the field, I asked my colleague, I said, what are these piles of dirt? That's the same thing to do. So we stopped, got out, walked across the field, looked, and those of you who can see in the middle, there's a little tube there. And what he explained to me was that the very poor people would go and find holes in the rice field where rats' nests were and they would dig up the rat nests and steal the rice from the rats. To me, that was one of the most demonstrations for poverty and their stealing from the rat. Now in terms of bringing open and proven lives, in that same area of Bangladesh today, farmers are far better off than they are growing Uri Rice varieties. As a matter of fact, in Bangladesh, when people talk about a new variety and improved technology, they call it Uri. So not only are there Uri Rices in Bangladesh, but very popular varieties of Uri potatoes, Uri chickpeas, which I'm delighted to my friends at SIP. I bet you didn't know there was a Uri potato growing in Bangladesh. It's not exactly called bloating or rubbing it in, but I certainly enjoy doing it. And poverty, again, what are the consequences of poverty? This is from a feeding center here not far from those bindings. Mount Hiroshima. Child or young mother. Hartman. Our work on bone rice, high zinc, rice, high iron zinc should go a long way towards making scenes like this increasingly rare. So the work we're doing is certainly, I think, in the right direction. There's no question about the need for it. And since I'm in the reflective mood when I was putting this presentation together, I thought I'd just say we're all starting for me, starting for me in Africa, in Sub-Saharan Africa. I'm down. The skinny one there. The beard. I had lunch with my staff yesterday and somebody who would go on a name and said, referred to me, and they said they saw a picture of me when I was at sea art. And they said, sir, you were almost skinny. What? I thought it was the most interesting way of saying you were still fat. Anyway, you can't resist. But in terms of creating hope, improving lives, our program in Africa and Burundi is just, the eastern southern Africa and Burundi is just a whole different story. African yields, rice fields are terrible. They're terrible. Very low. Very poor technology that we know. The country of Burundi where Chris and I lived for three years, daughter of one there went through a very terrible civil war. And at the end of the civil war, they came to a truce and they said, okay, everybody who turned in your weapons will give you money and a job. And so they did that. All the men who had the weapons turned their weapons in, they got money and a job. Unfortunately, in the rebel camps there were also plenty. They didn't have a weapon to turn in. And so they were left high and dry. They got no money. They had no jobs. They had to take to the poor. Well our folks there put together a program to start the TCC's women how to grow rice seed. Because rice was becoming a very, very popular crop in Burundi. I was there working on maize, subsequently many, many, many of the rice of the maize fields and now even the rice fields. But they didn't have an opportunity to get good seed. Our people went in trained those women seeds so that the farmers who want to be burglarized can get seeded and live in them. They were sitting there high and dry, these ex-combatants women. And they were unbelievably grateful. And these are the kinds of statements we got from them. Like, we were only eating once a day. Now we're eating twice a day. Gratitude for being able to eat twice a day instead of once a day. They can buy a little soap to wash their clothes. Proving lives. And then they come to you like a rookie. And I'm enormously proud of the work our people have done. Not a large number of people. It's not the hundreds of millions you have in South Asia. But it's still people. These are important people. That's confusion. And wherever you see things go. There have been noises in the years saying, well, rice consumption has gotten a lot, et cetera. As countries become more wealthy, they're going to eat more meat, they're going to eat more less rice, et cetera. And, you know, I'll direct that poll later if you will. I brought that argument. And if you look at the data, it just doesn't hold up. Per capita consumption of rice in Asia and worldwide is staying about the same. So again, the message is, rice is going to be around a while and our job is going to be in demand for quite some time. We expect global demand in per capita consumption remains the same and population growth continues as it will. In fact, now that the World Bank is talking about it, the U.S. is talking about 11 billion people by the end of the century, not 9 billion, the demand for rice is going to be exceedingly large. So we're going to be needed and we have got to be ahead of the game. But the trends are changing. It's a different world, a completely different world. When the hearing was founded, look at this graph here. 1960, the blue was the rural population, the red was the urban. Everybody was living out in the countryside. They had these wonderful idyllic lives, working at the rice paddies, I'm going to apologize. In five years, over half the Asia's population is going to be urban and that is going to be the reality. But those people are still going to eat and they're still going to want to eat rice. Our responsibility is to make sure they get that rice and get enough of it and it's done produced in a way that's comfortable to eat. The way rice is marketed, the way rice is consumed, that's 1960s, 1970s, 80s, even into the 90s. But it's changed. People are demanding more diverse types of rice. Rice is grown in a way that has seemed to be helpful for the environment. They want a different packaging, different types of rice, different types of gear. The whole way rice is marketed is going to change. The demand for rice will be strong but it will be a very different kind of demand in the future if we're going to have to address that. Where is it going to come from? Well, if we don't want to be cutting down rain forests and we don't want to be destroying fragile wetlands, it's going to have to come from existing rice lands.