 Thank you, Justin. Good afternoon everyone. As Justin said, we were asked this morning to pull something together and it's always interesting to know how many ways you can look at the activities of your organisation. And so the slides that we were asked to look at today was our approaches to adoption. So this has just been pulled together this morning and we learnt some stuff along the way. And I want to acknowledge my colleagues who are here today who were able to answer some of the questions. I'm going to take it at a very different level to what you've seen before. So I'm going to be talking about the culmination of some of the technologies and science that you've seen and we sort of refer to them as agricultural innovation. So the slides that I'm looking at is acknowledging there's some fabulous research going on. How do we get the results of that research into the hands of the farmers and I'm going to be talking about the farmers in the developing world in order to have the impact on food security that's really driving this research. So I'm going to start with introducing ACR and the International Food Security Centre discussing some of our approaches to adoption and then we'll give a few examples of the projects that we've been doing. So ACR is a statutory authority within the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade portfolio for an independent agency therefore. We're part of the aid program and we're both a research funder and a manager. We're about 31 years old and we're better known internationally than we are nationally. And we also have not only our headquarters in Canberra but we have about a dozen offices across the developing world. So we do a number of things. We're probably best known for commissioning research into improving agriculture production and other activities as you'll hear later on in the developing countries. And we do that by brokering partnerships. So we're a bit like a marriage broker. We bring together Australian research partners, many of our partners in the room today and international and developing country researchers to solve problems to do with agriculture and food security in their countries. A lot of the work that we do has directed indirect benefits back to Australia and the Crawford Fund at the end of last year released a book doing what we're doing good which really tends to quantify the benefits of that. Whether it be through some of the work on improved genetic resources it could be new technologies and techniques that we can use and can be through some different exchange. We also have significant training programs both formal through PhD studies and informal at a sort of policy level. We're known for communicating a lot of the work that we do and we also administer Australia's contribution which is quite significant and growing to the international agriculture research centres or the CGIR and we've heard a bit about, well the last talk talked about area for instance. And we have a very close relationship to the research prioritisation activity that's currently being undertaken at the moment through the CG. You may be aware with the change of government that current focus now in terms of the aid program is on economic diplomacy and we've all been spending a lot of time defining what that is, understanding and looking at how it relates to our work. ACL is really fortunate that it's not difficult to do that pretty much almost everything we do falls within the bands of economic development and improving trained and laid relations. It's well known that investment in the agricultural sector improves GDP investment four times better than investing in any other sector. So we know that investing in agriculture is just really going to help the economic development in those countries. Recently we did a study and we looked at the projects that we have and we found that 75% of the projects that we're currently undertaking is focused on the market access and value chain work. And I think if you've done that review maybe 15 years ago, Toadfish is here somewhere, it will be much more on the production and so this is something that's been happening anyway and that's because of the complicated systems that we're working in. Just an example because Les is here, the Pakistan Mango project is an active project that's under way at the moment and it's looking at improving the transport of mangoes using safe rate and then controlled at speed to the Netherlands. They're at sea for a very long time but the results of the research that we've done and it's still underway has shown that through this transportation they arrive in perfect condition and it's really opened up in markets for the mango growers there. So that's just one little example of how we can relate to the aid to trade and economic diplomacy agenda. So the Australian International Food Security Research Centre is a new initiative that was announced at the Chargum at the end of 2011. Our focus is on accelerating adoption and so when we talk about food security we're really looking at the full definition of agricultural production, access to food and utilization which is another way of saying food quality including nutrition quality including safe food and non-toxic food. So in order to do that we really try to bridge the gap between the research and development professionals and try and involve them early on in the research to improve the chance of development and adoption and we also work significantly through partnerships. At the moment the Food Security Centre is focused in south, southern and eastern Africa. The work that we do and this is part of ensuring it's adopted has to be identified at a country or sub-regional or pan-African level and we're really fortunate that there's such strong leadership when it comes to agricultural research in Africa that we've been able to leverage off. In June this year at the African Union all of the African countries will be signing on to an African science agenda which is really going to have a priority for anyone including the CGN, other international agencies and the national agencies within Africa in terms of research priorities and what development outcomes that this work is aiming to achieve. We're also really keen to leverage off existing work and that also means utilizing co-investment particularly with the private sector we'll talk a bit about that later. And it's also, I'm not going to talk too much about gender but just to recognize that in the areas that we work the majority of the farmers are women yet they don't have anywhere near the access to basic technologies, seeds, credit, land, information at all market and it's really low hanging fruit and if we just focused on ensuring without doing any more research ensuring that the women farmers of Africa had access the same access to what the men farmers do we could improve agricultural yields by 30% which equates to about 150 million people no longer going hungry. And then finally we're also cognizant of being being able to draw on where Australia's comparative advantage is and we've heard quite a bit about that earlier today. So what is it that Australia is really good at and what sort of technologies and farming techniques can we explore? So this is the theory of change for our centre. I just want to draw your attention to two things. One is this lens. So we have three research programmes which pretty well reflect the definitions of production, markets and nutrition and then we have some capacity building programmes. The lens that all of our activities operate through is looking at accelerating the adoption and then we have some intermediate development outcomes here great access to ag technologies better informant supported policies increased access to more nutritious and safe food less post-harvest loss with the aim for food security goal. Now this graph has since been updated I don't have the latest data but it shows that Africa here is really lagging behind the rest of the world not only in producing improved varieties but also in adopting improved varieties. There's a lot of data here as I said for 2010 for Africa but it's 35% adoption and that's significantly behind the rest of the world. So in Asia it's about 60% and in South America it's about 80%. So we're really focusing on why is that and there's a whole stack of reasons why that is and so we're trying to put some data and a better understanding about that rather than relying on some of the anecdotal evidence out there at the moment. This is one view of an impact pathway and I wanted just to show you a couple of things so the area that we've all traditionally focused on is doing research and delivering scientific helpables and that's including the CGIAR. Where we're now being asked to work is here and that's developing or delivering development outcomes or intermediate development outcomes and really engaging the end user in the research cycle and ensuring that at least with our target group of users they're able to adopt and use the outputs of the research. Now as you can see we're sort of losing control here. We're losing the area that we tightly control is this part here and we're all really good at being able to deliver these outputs and results but this is the area that the agricultural scientific world is being pushed into and that means we need to partner with different people. We need to get social scientists and anthropologists and a whole range of other people on the team early on in order to ensure that by the end of the project we're heading into this sphere. So the Food Security Centre that I'm the director of is really focused on as I said adoption and looking at the constraints and the incentives and just trying to understand that better and with those learnings trying to incorporate that into some of our future research projects. So while our projects are doing fantastic science on whatever issue they're looking at in addition to that we've asked them to identify what the impediment to adoption is in their project whose behaviour within that project so who are the key stakeholders in that project needs to change in order to remove that and that could be the researchers, could be the farmers, could be the policy makers, could be the extension agents, could be the private sector and what mechanism is being used in that project to reduce it and I'll share some of those mechanisms with you we'll actually hear that out here. So some of our projects are relying on leveraging off existing national programs and policies to ensure we can scale out utilising the private sector is really key especially for sustainability. Innovation platforms are best practice hubs things that are particularly successfully being adapted in Africa. Innovation platforms are where you put all the players along a value chain together to solve the problem and Fred is here with us today and A and B are doing a small scale irrigation project with us in a couple of countries in Africa and I think the basis of the change that they're seeking to achieve is through innovation platforms and taking a high level policy top down and a farmer based management bottom up approach and bringing them together through an innovation platform. Gender empowerment is particularly powerful as it's looking at what's happening at a system level rather than just a commodity level. Institutional capacity building Eric's going to come in in the end and talk about some of the work we're doing looking at demand pool instead of technology push. But before I go there I just wanted to also recognise that ACR is renowned for some of the impact assessment work it's been doing over the last three years and adoption study work. This work generally happens at least three years after the end of the project it's independently done and the adoption studies aren't done on all projects but they really provide us with not just quantitative but qualitative information on what are the characteristics of our projects that have really had good and successful adoption and are there some characteristics that are common to all of them. When we started in Africa we actually went back through the last 30 years or so and compiled the data and there wasn't a particularly strong level of adoption but where there was success it was really dependent on having the end users on board at the very beginning of the research and also having really clear disseminational impact pathways identified through the project. This is some of the work that's come out unfortunately I don't have time to go into it in too much detail but you can see the fact is inhibiting the success and then the corollary here in terms of what was successful. Lack of incentive so knowing I remember talking about risk it's really about farmers being in a position to take a risk and they need to be able to have demonstrated to them what the impact of whatever the change is being able to know about and access it is obviously a major inhibiting factor and then there's a whole lot of stuff about infrastructure policy factors etc. Continuity of staff is a big one and something that is really important when you're looking at technology such as agricultural modelling like the absence stuff we saw earlier if you've got really mobile stuff and this requires a lot of expertise to be held in country then we've had quite unsuccessful adoption levels where there's been a lot of movement of staff in these countries for example. Okay so here's an example of a project which is really leveraging on the national program Ethiopia and Rwanda have got major agroforestry programs underway at the moment they're pledging to plant 100 million trees over a period of time we're looking at integrating tree crops into farming systems through this project into maize systems in particular so it's really looking at on the one hand the spacings and the type of species in order to improve the maize yield and the results are really good I mean in a good season we can double or treble the maize yields in those areas. In a bad season that may not be the case in terms of maize you've got alternative livelihood options through fodder, through wood products and particularly through food and it's interesting a lot of these communities that we're working in have been quite adamant that they want to grow they want those tree crops to be food crops rather than fodder crops which is interesting but of course really important for the sustainability of that project but the other thing we're looking at is can these national programs and the extension services that they're training around these projects provide an effective scarlet mechanism and aircraft, the world agroforestry center is the project leader in that project this is one looking at the private sector interestingly small scale mechanization has not reached Africa it still had hose as in back in the biblical time and there's a whole lot of things happening such as urbanization, conflict, disease which is really lowering the labor force within small holder farms and the women farmers just aren't able to be as productive as they like because they just don't have the ability all the time of the day so this project is looking to introduce handheld small two wheel tractors to improve planting and harvesting but also processing and transport as well but we're really talking about models of small, higher and least scale so this, well there's a lot of agronomy and a lot of engineering in this project the number for us in terms of adoption is it's testing a whole range of business models in these different areas to see what can deliver sustainability and the other interesting part of this project is it's an example of South-South cooperation so we've got India and Bangladesh who have probably 90% uptake of these two wheel tractors in their farming systems to come and work with their African partners and look at importing it, maintaining it leasing it, those sorts of things this is being led by Senators Best Practice Hubs is another method that we're looking at and this project is really focused on peri-urban vegetables to improve not only nutrition but also livelihoods and it's got very strong focus on use and that's in recognition of the urbanization that we're seeing so dramatically in South Saharan Africa and it's predominantly in India and they're going to the cities and there's no work for them they're quite entrepreneurial and by them leaving the rural land there's less people living to grow food so peri-urban agriculture is seen as quite an attractive option for farming because it's high value it's fast paced there's many opportunities to do entrepreneurial value adding services and industries that's been off that this project's being led by the World Vegetable Center and you can see the countries that it's been operational in it's been really successfully tested in Western Africa and this is an example of the model and it's sort of a combination of research on-site and demonstration sites where a whole range of activities happen as well as training in those sites and associated with that is a lot of work in terms of variety selection developing seed systems developing post-harvest technologies to reduce waste developing integrated pest management technologies to use in the field and reduce anti-nutritional aspects of the production and then over here we've got the consumer end which is really nutrition and home economics about using some of these crops some of these crops are indigenous crops that haven't been used for quite a while and people have forgotten how to cook with them the market access etc another area that we've just started to work in and this is really building on Australia's comparative advantage Australia's really strong in biosecurity and there's some of the aspects that we do here which is quite transferable to these countries and in our consultations it became really evident that intra-regional trade you see there's a key pathway to food security there's a number of obstacles to that so that's moving food or seed or produce from one country to another those borders and one of the obstacles that we think we can deal with is biosecurity obstacles and that's just because of the lack of capacity and some basic surveillance risk assessment etc monitoring so we've currently got out of tender we've called for an expression of interest for Australian providers to work with us in developing some capacity training of sort of mid-level policy people within the African region and to develop an alumni of expertise at a regional level and also develop linkages with Australian expertise to try and unlock at least one of the obstacles to food security in the region which ultimately what we've focused on domestic and regional could lead to international trade as well okay so I'm going to hand over to Eric just to finish up this particular project is in alliance with ourselves the Sogente Foundation for Systemical Agriculture and the Global Foundation so as Melissa said we're focused on on studying and researching adoption there's a perception that maybe some of the improved varieties that plant readers of the public sector in the developing countries have gone out to farmers in the past decades have not been adopted so we'll try and explore this so here I have just summarized very briefly the lack of adoption questions that we want to study so the traditional varieties are massively used by farmers but in Africa in particular there's a big shift from self-consumption to a new range of utilization of the food their traders become involved a lot of new demands on the crops between the fresh market and now the supermarket in the growing cities of Africa processing now export so all the questions we are asking is how to get the market signals that are now emerging to impact on the researchers and basically this study that we are undertaking with a range of other partners we'll try and understand what makes a good plant reader to address the needs of the market and determine those needs so if I have another few minutes just about adoption of what we do I've been involved at ACR on the conservation farming projects which are one of the best applications of Australia's expertise in two developing countries so because it's not a well-known story we had for a long time a project in the dry lands of northern Iraq which is coming to an end this year but as an offshoot of that project and without any investment of the Australian government conservation farming studies have been used by local farmers in Syria and despite the conflict in Syria we kept in contact with the people who were involved in the project for the last seven or eight years and it's important to note that in the background of conflict and all the difficulties people have life goes on and so for example that extension agent she's a scientist in a small research station near the town of Hama and after having been exposed to the research experiments on conservation farming and no till she's actually continued to promote the technology and even today she's conducting field experiments, sorry on-station experiments and also dissemination to farmers now it's important to note that a major factor in the technology adoption in these circumstances is the fact that the farmers have a strong interest in saving fuel because diesel availability in Syria at the moment is very limited we're finishing the project in Iraq on a high note and so one of the major contributions of Australia is about the design of the appropriate cedar for no till planting of cereal and legumes so here you have on the left a picture of a field day where a no till cedar is introduced to the farmer and the gentleman here with the hat is the leader of the project in Iraq he's an agricultural research scientist at the University of Mosul in the Nineveh province of Iraq and so he said we can't travel to Iraq it's a place where as a federal government agent we are not allowed to travel but we have regular meeting and contact with these people on the left here an interesting reflection on the continuity of Australian assistance to the Middle East this machine is a cedar manufactured in South Australia by John Shearer a famous Australian agricultural equipment company which has been converted to do no till agriculture recently and on the basis of that we now have in Mosul in Northern Iraq local workshop small operators developing local cedars for no till farming which we believe is going to produce sustainability of this work because now there will be machinery available that's locally made and so that's on the right the first prototype that's been tested and validated by the scientists we support and so it's called HACIDA which means conservation in Arabic