 I am Sushil Pandey, economist and leader of program 7 which is rice policy support and impact assessment for rice research or in short rice policy and impact. Two major objectives of the program are hence to provide sound advice to policy makers, business managers, donors regarding priority setting and the design of agricultural interventions and this will be done through policy analysis, livelihood studies and impact assessment focused on rice systems. The second objective is to build capacity of our national partners so that they are able to do this kind of work by themselves. The program has five outputs and my colleagues will be reporting in detail about these five outputs in the in this video. What I would like to do here is to provide some of the key highlights of the outputs and one that I would like to focus more really is on the use of the GIS to map out the rice growing areas, rice yield as well as the extent of poverty in rice growing areas. The other part of the activity that I would like to highlight is the work we have accomplished in 2007 and published in 2007 was a study of drought coping mechanisms of farmers specifically focusing on eastern India which is renfed rice growing areas. The third component which was actually done this year in 2008 is the rice policy forum to obtain national perspectives on key policy issues on rice research. My purpose here is just to update you briefly on progress in world rice statistics. Over the past year we have been working to reformat the world rice statistics and bring it up to date. We hope to be able not only to update the website but to put out a published version of world rice statistics. This time I have three outputs to share with you, two from output two and one from output three and the first one is this one. Last year we had workshop on poverty and income dynamics in rural Asia and Africa. One of the key finding of this workshop is that long-term impact of green revolution is much greater than what we sought. The second one is research on adoption and impact of alternate wetting and drying technology. We are doing this research in China and also in the Philippines. And the third output is about the water management system in Tamil Nadu, India. For 2007, two impact studies are almost at the completion stage. The first study done by our group is on the economic impact of the tree reductions tree gains technology. More conveniently referred to as 3R3G, it is a knowledge-intensive technology specifically designed for the farmers in the Mekong Delta region. The project promoted the use of good seeds, live-collar charts and no spraying of insecticides in the first 45 days in order to reduce input use and cause without affecting yield. Programme 7.5 has a particular focus on pro-poor diffusion of new technology. An example is with rice duck technology that was introduced in Bangladesh. So we would say that the extension method has to match the expertise and resources of the partner. Another area that's incredibly important in pro-poor diffusion are partnerships. We need to include dissemination partners at the research design stage, assist partners with additional knowledge and linkages and in partnerships look for long-term organisational commitment. In pro-poor diffusion it's important to be purposeful and accountable in poverty focus and gender inclusiveness. So this involves including women farmers in the selection of best lines. I think here of the PVS work where women are engaged. So a general principle we've come up with is that women need to be given access to all agricultural information. One of the achievements that we have done is to compile a database which are disaggregated by gender to be able to examine all these broader changes that will affect the household particularly the gender relations. Another achievement that we have is to identify the opportunities in helping them as farmers and in what ways we can equip them with technical knowledge and skills. In terms of the outlook for this for 2008 and beyond the key areas that we will be studying doing our research will be on rice trade domestic markets and prices. As I mentioned before this is a critically important area especially in the current context so that would be a key focus. The second one is that we will continue the further discussion with our national partners and continue to organize rice policy forums and provide the information to the policy makers from that. We will also establish a network of rice policy researchers so that we can exchange our views in a rapid and more efficient manner. And finally a lot of work we plan to do will relate to rice research prioritization to be able to identify high priority research areas where ERI and its national partners can make substantial impact. In summary 2007 was a year of transition as we moved from the old program structure to the new and there have been lot of exciting new areas of research that we have started at the same time we have been able to accomplish some of the key research that had been going on for couple of years. So I would say that the 2007 the progress has been substantial and we are really excited about starting some of the new areas of research.