 90s and early turn turn of the Millennium they're back there they're already being built back on talking rice Corn corn is scary just because the biofuel We're just talking rice But I think there's a fairly there's two components This is sort of natural economic response to optimal size of stops and then I think we will get some encouragement out of the the financial world Banks of the world to figure out some way to encourage the larger countries To hold a little up a bit larger stocks And we don't have to require these stocks to be accessible to the world market because these are countries that are big enough That the traders will know that it's there quick thing to I the one thing I see is the old Isaac Asimov theory We can all predict on trend, but you can never predict the outlier If you look what happened in Russia that this last year the 2008 run happened without a food shortage Russia's decrease in the crop goes back to the 70s and 80s great grain robberies And so we can predict on trend, but you can't predict You know the person that comes and it's just a genius Which isn't me the person that comes and you can change the very food functioning and hopefully that here You can start the second revolution Like what happened in Russia this year where they lost a third of the crop You have an outlier like China or countries Thailand the Philippines We've never experienced what happened in wheat in the 70s 80s and rice They had wood if you had an outlier event, which global warming could cause This discussion becomes very quickly beautiful. Now you have to have so a question of the year Yes, please and then the lady in front first first in the back storage problems. Yes, we do harvest process is something that Considerable debate over whether we lose 30% of the crop before it gets to the consumer or maybe it's close to 10 or 12% anyway, there's significant losses in the whole post harvest technology and that's we include that that set of recommendations in the sort of eerie rice side of things because eerie has a very good post post-arvest research program that they do a lot of collaboration on that The new there's storage techniques that are using nitrogen now so you can store rice Much more effectively than we could have done Even even 10 years ago the milling technologies are are improving Yes, that's a that's a serious question Having said that Expensive to store rice for very long Even if you can stop the physical deterioration by appropriate investment in in the technology It still just cost you money to have your money tied up In in in stocks And so we don't Lightly talk about purge larger holding larger reserves of grain of rice because we understand how Expensive that is and in some fundamental sense how efficient that is trade as a way of evening out production Instability is so much more efficient than trying to do it with large reserve stocks Now the difficulty is if countries are going to prohibit trade You don't have any choice. You need the reserves Yes storage Rats are a big problem post harvest and in Asia. They say some rats are four-legged and some life rats are two-legged Worldwide life fun. What kind of role does the private industry play in this total in this rice picture? Oh my god companies like Archie then you midland all Monsanto in a footnote. I did a calculation Oh How large is the private sector as the as a share of the world economy and how much is it public sector and NGO and other? And the answer is yeah, it's 95% private. That's farmers The marketing system processing storage When when you pull the private actors out there About 95% of the value of ultimate production is in the hands of the private sector. That's different than asking of World trade the stuff that crosses borders How much of that is in the hands of the private sector? Jeremy knows a whole lot better than I do but my senses the actual physical Logistics are virtually all Private but many of the debils get made As public this is a question better for Duncan. I believe it when you're asking how much it is far as donation comes from companies Just answering research The main development for the private sector in research has been with the technological hybrid rice Which is Yes, yes, I'm not going to talk about post harvest Mechanization research or anything like that for fertilizer or another that would be to quite rightly says is Far and away 90% is all private sector Just from the institutes if you like specific interest, which is rice breeding Developing of new rice varieties and using the thousands of varieties are there which obviously is a key part in many ways It's what the farmers grow Traditionally has been in the public sector But with the development of hybrid rice Which is very prevalent for example in China around half the rice in China is hybrids But it requires a fundamental shift in how rice is growing in Asia Whereas farmers would keep the seed and plant it again year after year with hybrid rice You the farmers need to buy the seed to plant and this Provides an opportunity for the private sector. It's essentially a product So they can develop the the product that is a rice variety That if it's good enough the farmer should buy from them every year But the challenge is right there. Can they develop the product of the standard that they want? In China they manage through subsidies through government programs to get hybrid rice adopted It'll be very interesting to see what happens with these technology over the next few years. I since beta has something Public sector, excuse me, even the public sector the private gets involved in and so There is some G to G Trade government government to government, but mostly, you know, if you want to know the biggest player of rice in the world It's Louis Dreyfus Corporation Followed by probably Olam, which is actually interesting enough. They're talking about a merger And ADM is the biggest player probably in the US and so I would say Probably 20% is G to G government to government and of that maybe 10% is real No trade involved. So almost all of it is the trade is involved in one way or the other interesting development is actually Vietnam Vietnam has Really started to increase its taste for private trade for rice There's been a learning curve in Vietnam as they privatized the trade and gone from Vina 1 to other smaller companies, which is Like all learning curves. They're learning, you know, how the world market works. And so most of it's private But government transactions are large and they move things around Bill for the years and when I was with the Ford Foundation 30 years ago even funded Erie programs in places like like Bangladesh Right there are other incarnations Question for you Duncan Demand for rice is going up Land that's under cultivation if I understand it correctly maybe maybe going down land is going out of production Yields have pretty much flattened when I was working in Indonesia 25 years ago. We were talking about the yields of four tons a hectare What I think would be interesting for this group to know is what's on the horizon? What looks promising? Around production is one of you two mentioned earlier is what's happening with respect to global warming So as you're are you focusing on yield? Are you focusing on drought tolerant varieties? You're constantly trying to stay ahead of new insect biotypes that are coming up all the time But tell us where give us some hope here Bill yes You're right absolutely right the fundamental goal of the Institute is to try to increase rice production and there's this Two or three parts to the answer first and foremost It's to work with the farmers the varieties that many farmers grow across Asia have the ability to Healed more with good management So it's what we call the yield gap that they're growing a variety They might be only getting three or four tons a hectare But they could be getting five or six and it might be three better use of fertilizer better use of water A whole range of things better can management of pests or diseases So that would be a key area and there's a whole range of crop management strategies out there and and trying to get farmers to adopt them But you know if you already heard we're talking about tens of millions of farmers who operate on two hectares Many of them with very little education if not illiterate So it's a great challenge and unfortunately what's happened with what we call extension systems These are the systems Largely government funded government run which traditionally had the role of getting knowledge and getting information to farmers Have become very underfunded very under resourced and these these extension systems don't function as they should in many countries So for technical advice Farmers are left in many cases with the private sector Who have in many cases specific products Whether it's a insecticide or pesticide or fertilizer that they want to use Responsible members of the private sector do that well and it's not to sort of Label all the private sector is not handling that sort of extension advice badly But there's a need there to get better information to farmers. So that's number one Secondly in the pure science of it in the breeding of new rice varieties as I said earlier There is definite potential One particular project Is called a C4 rice and if I may just have a little one minute of science with you There are two types of crops in the world basically C3 and C4 C stands for carbon carbon atoms three carbon atoms in the rice plant It's a C3 plant and the maize plant is a C4 for carbon atoms It's to do with the photosynthetic process using sunlight to convert it into plant material Essentially corn is a more evolved plant than rice Because it's got four carbon atoms and you're going to have to look at corn. It's a bigger leafier Big ear of corn on it compared to the rice plant smaller and the challenge for the scientists is could you speed up the evolutionary process and Transform rice from a C3 plant into a C4 That is give it a greatly improved photosynthetic process. So it would use sunlight to produce Think of a big rice plant with lots of grain Fantastic water use efficiency much better of fertiliser use efficiently We believe we can do it and again organizations like the Gates Foundation are funding us It's going to take us 20 years To do this. It's similar. The Gates actually call it one of their Apollo projects. It's the only one in agriculture Apollo is in flying to the moon Along the way, we're going to learn so much about how plants grow and how sunlight is used to produce food It will have enormous benefits for all of us already. They're looking at for example one area of rice plant that could convert Nitrogen in the soil into the fertilizer it needs Biological fixation of nitrogen for those who know it is available in legumes But not in rice that could be just one spin-off of the C4 rice plant and that would considerably increase yields in a fundamentally Probably provide Asia's food security well into the next century That's the second one and then the third one of course is in what we call Biodic stresses abelic stresses droughts floods you've seen one example there a flood tolerant rice drought tolerant rice is coming salinity tolerant rice for growing rice in areas of rising