 I'm Dan Rundy. I hold the Shrier Chair here at CSIS. It's really a great pleasure to host this event with my friends at Catholic Relief Services. We have some folks who've traveled long distances to be with us today. We're going to be talking about the evolution of multi-sector partnerships as a way to achieve development. And I think what's been missing from a lot of the conversations that we've had about multi-sector partnerships is the critical role of development non-governmental organizations such as Catholic Relief Services and the evolution of how they've worked with the private sector. We also have two very respected companies who have been on long journeys and long trajectories with organizations like Catholic Relief Services as well as with other development non-governmental organizations. And I think what we're going to have a chance to do is to unpack the evolution of the relationships between companies and non-profits and NGOs as well as the role of local governments, the role of local community, how we work in local communities, as well as the role for international donors such as USAID. We have a very interesting panel and I'm very much looking forward to hearing from them. I first want to recognize Hugh Aprile, who is the Country Representative for Catholic Relief Services in Nicaragua, as well as Rick Pizer, who is the Director of Social Advocacy and Supply Chain Community Outreach for Green Mountain Coffee Roasters. And then we have Gisela Tiongson, who is the Executive Director of the Jollibee Group Foundation. Let me speak about each of the organizations in turn very briefly and then I'm going and sort of frame this up a little bit and then I'm going to ask Gisela to start us off. Catholic Relief Services is a very large and global international development organization. We have Sean Callahan here who's the COO of Catholic Relief Services and Sean was on the Sid Washington Board with me so I'm really happy you've come down from Baltimore, thanks for being here. And I've gotten to know Carolyn Wu, who is the CEO starting in January of 2012 before coming to Catholic Relief Services. Dr. Wu was the Dean of the Notre Dame Business School so brings a private sector perspective to her work at Catholic Relief Services. I think what I find interesting is how Catholic Relief Services has been trying to grapple with the challenges of poor people around the world and how they've evolved their thinking over time. They've certainly always brought a lot of expertise and have taken a long-term view. I was looking at their website and they have pages and pages of technical experts. I counted at least 25 in sectors such as agriculture, gender, education, health, peace building, microfinance, M&E. It's a very deep technical bench and I think we'll have a chance to sort of unpack that and what attracts companies to working with organizations like Catholic Relief Services, the long-standing commitment to communities, their ability to reach into communities that others may not be working in, but also their deep, deep technical strength. And I think that's what we're going to be able to pull out of it. But I also think what we're going to take away from this discussion is the evolution and thinking, I don't think 10 years ago we'd have had this discussion. I mean we'd have had sort of, this discussion is sort of an emerging model, but the conversation we're going to be having today is much more about an established model, a way of doing business that's deep. It's a big part of how development NGOs think it's how companies think about accomplishing their goals, but I think it's also implied changes in how organizations like Catholic Relief Services think about how they do their job and the incentives and the way they organize themselves. I think it has implications for their futures. I also think it has implications for how companies need to achieve their goals in terms of both business, their core business goals, as well as their social license to operate and other goals that they may have. Let me just briefly touch on two other things, which is that Gisella's organization, the Jollibee Group, is one of the most admired companies in the Philippines and in Asia. So it may not be as well known here in the United States, but it's a huge company. It has 2,500 stores around the world, mainly in the Philippines, but also all over Asia. There are, I think you have 30 stores in the United States, 60 stores, excuse me, and source a large amount of goods and services, at least a billion dollars in dollars, not in Philippine pesos, but in American dollars, from all sorts of suppliers, including agricultural suppliers. So think about a billion dollars versus, say, a hundred million dollar assistance program. Well, what we really want to be about is connecting smallholder farmers to large supply chains, billion dollar supply chains. That's what we want to be about, and that's, I think, what Catholic Relief Services has plugged into. We're going to hear about the Farmer Entrepreneurship Program in a minute. We also have Green Mountain Coffee Roasters in the form, as I said, of Rick Pizer. Green Mountain Coffee Roasters is a much larger company than just Green Mountain Coffee, which many of you drink, I certainly do, but they also have Keurigs, and they have Timothes, they have Van Houtens, a variety of brands that many of you know, and so it may not just be the bags of coffee you buy, it's also those pods that Keurig pods, that's Green Mountain Coffee Roasters. So the issue of a predictable, high quality supply of coffee is something that's an ongoing challenge, and there's all sorts of challenges, whether it's about reliability, whether it's about disease in terms of leaf rust in Central America, acts issues of financing, these are ongoing challenges, these are development challenges, and these are business challenges, both for Jollibee and for Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, but what they have found is a partner in the form of Catholic Relief Services. With that, I'm going to stop and I'm going to turn it over to my colleagues on the panel, because you all came to hear them, not to hear me. So I'll stop and I'm going to ask Gisela Tiongson to tell us a little about the Farmer Entrepreneurship Program. Gisela, the floor is yours. Thank you, Dan. Good morning, everyone. I'd like to make a few remarks, and then we'll show you a video just to give you better illustration also of the work that we're doing. But I come from the Philippines, it's a middle income country in Southeast Asia that means that for many years we're considered the poor man of Asia, but recently has really shown a lot of stride in terms of the economy. We actually pegged the highest GNP growth in the region for the first quarter of 2013. So there's a lot of growth, but the government and all sectors are concerned about how to translate that growth into equity, into making sure that growth becomes inclusive for all. The challenge is very clear because 30% of the poor remain, the 30% of the population remain poor and majority of them are in rural areas where farming is the main source of income. In the Philippines, because you've had a series of land reform or agrarian reform initiatives, a typical farmer would only have five acres of land to plant. So you have a lot of small holding farmers, and so if you are to buy from them, how do you now begin the whole issue of consolidation? There are steps being taken to address this, and the private sector actually has been an active partner. We've been lacking the Philippines to have had a long history and tradition of corporate social responsibility. For instance, Philippine business for social progress was set up in 1970 as a foundation funded annually by companies income, and that is the funds are used to fund various NGO and community projects. So there's been actually a lot of attempts to work with small farmers for the big companies, but there wasn't that exact way to manage it because the farmers will not be able to meet the pricing, the quality, and the reliability requirements of the company. I represent Jollibee Foods Corporation. As Dan has mentioned, we are in operation for the last 35 years and has been posting, posted $2.5 billion revenue last year. In 2005, the company set up the foundation with an explicit mandate of making sure that the resources and expertise within the companies is made possible and accessible to communities to improve their lives. As a company, the leadership made the conscious decision in 2007 to utilize its value chain as a way to engage small farmers and improve their income and improve their productivity. For example, one of our biggest requirements is onions because we use fresh onions for our burgers. And annually, we have about 3,000 tons of onion requirements, which translates to about $30 million of onion requirements. The nice thing about the company is that traditionally that's how we started to work with small businesses. And as the company grew, then these businesses also grew with them. But again, working directly with the small farmers has not been very easy. So the traditional route has been to work with traders, middlemen, who will do the consolidation for us. But in 2007, the foundation was tasked to find a way to make it work. And because we knew at the onset that it's not an easy task, we looked for partners. And the CRS is one of those that came out because we just came out with a book on agroenterprise clustering, which they have applied in other parts of the country for other buyers, but not for institutional markets like us. So that started the partnership in 2008. And five years later, I'd like to now show the video to tell everybody where we are. How do we show the video? Can we do that? Poverty incidence in the sector is four times higher than the rest of the population. Reasons for this abound, such as farmers' limited access to infrastructure, affordable funding, and sustainable markets. The government has increased the agriculture and agrarian reform budgets by over 50 percent in order to boost food production. It allocated additional funding for irrigation, farm-to-market roads, transport, and trading posts. Both the government and the private sector are addressing these challenges. In 2008, the collaboration of the Catholic Relief Services, National Livelihood Development Corporation, and Jollibee Group Foundation gave birth to the bridging farmers to the JFC supply chain program. The aim was to transform farming into an enterprise through effective farming technologies, agro-enterprise planning, access to formal financing, and institutional buyers. It has now evolved into the Farmer Entrepreneurship Program. Members of the Calasag Farmers' Producers Cooperative of Greva Ecija were the first beneficiaries of this approach. With the support of the local government unit, Calasag developed their own enterprise plan using the clustering approach. In addition, the onion farmers were provided with access to financing and linkage to Jollibee Foods Corporation, which bought the bulb onions directly from the farmers. Since then, Calasag has shown a remarkable change in how its farmers grow and manage their produce. It has become a model for managing and operating agro-enterprises. The Farmer Entrepreneurship Program has been replicated in many parts of the country, from the mountains of Pangasinan to the hills of Agusan del Sur and the fields of Davao Oriental. A working group composed of the local government unit, a micro-finance institution, and members of the academy worked together with the farmers to implement the program. Indeed, agricultural development plays a crucial role in our country's economic progress. This development will be sustained by empowering farmers to become successful entrepreneurs. Okay, so I need to show a few slides. This has not been an easy journey for us, and I think just to show you, we do have a slide which showed how when our purchasing groups started to work with the Calasag farmers, they were evaluated based on what they called the purchasing value matrix. I think it's the PowerPoint. So there's a set of indicators whereby they assess all the different suppliers of the company, and this is how Calasag fair at the onset. So in terms of management, quality, logistics, innovation, cost, and risk, so out of the many indicators, they only had three checkmarks. Yes, though the samples submitted the standards, they could initially supply 60 tons, and because there is a technical assistance provided by CRS, it also lessened the risk on the part of the company. So having red marks is bad, right? They could have been automatically said, you know, you cannot be a supplier, but you know, this is how they started. And five years down the line, this is now how Calasag is doing. So their only risk now is really weather, and that's a real issue because we're in the tropical setting. But over the years Calasag has proven that it could actually develop management and business expertise to be able to deal not just with Jollibee now, but with other food companies that are also directly buying from them. And the key to that I think is next slide please, is this eight-step agroenterprise clustering approach that Catholic Relief Services has developed over the years. If you notice, the seventh step, which is test marketing, is the only time by which the farmers would actually deliver to the company. Prior to that is a whole series of preparation. And what we tell our companies that, you know, by the time they sit down with you in the negotiating table, and that's between the two of you, we don't have any role in it, CRS, the foundation or NLDC, by the time they sit down with you, they know their numbers, they know their price, and they can tell you exactly how much they can deliver. So over the past five years Calasag has maintained that relationship and is now poised to move on to other markets as I said. And hopefully this is something that we can now begin to replicate in more and more areas. And doing that by working with local government units. So CRS at the onset did all the groundwork working with the farmers. But if we were to expand, we were saying what is important also is to tap the local institutions in the area, because CRS cannot be there forever. But those LGUs, those microfinance institutions and the academy are the ones who are on a day-to-day basis can address the concerns of the farmers. So that's the strategy that we are now taking, how to bring this experience to more areas in partnership with the national government in a manner that transfers not just the technology of it, but the whole partnership mindset, which is really essential in this whole project. Thanks very much, Gisella. Let me ask, Rick, if you would let's shift gears and we're going to move to another continent. We're going to move to Nicaragua and Central America. Rick, Green Mountain sources coffee from all over the world. You need to have, you have a, I was looking at your website, you have a very deep commitment as a company to working with coffee communities. You have a series of metrics that you use to accomplish that. You work in partnership with organizations like Catholic Relief Services to achieve those goals. Tell us a little bit about Green Mountain coffee. Tell us a little bit about how you're, you work in Central America and how you came to work with Catholic Relief Services. Good morning and thank you for the invitation to join you this morning. I've been with Green Mountain Coffee Roasters since 1987. My first day was Black Monday, those of you who were old enough to remember that day. Green Mountain Coffee Roasters is a much smaller organization at that point in time with three retail stores and about 30 employees in Waterbury, Vermont that was the office staff, the roasting staff, the delivery staff, the service staff, that was everybody. Very, very intimate organization at the time. It was a company that was founded in 1981 in a retail cafe with a coffee roaster in Waitsfield, Vermont, which is a very small village at the bottom of Sugarbush and Glen Ellen ski areas located in the heart of the Green Mountains, the heart of often referred to as the People's Republic of Vermont. And so this company gradually grew. Today we are a company last year and we ended the year with $3.8 billion in sales with just over 6,000 employees. And a lot of this growth has been driven by a purchase that the company made a number of, not too many years ago, six or seven years ago of a company called Keurig, which is a single cup coffee brewer that uses K-Cups that has been really driving the company's growth. Over the years, we have become, over the past few years, we've become the world's largest purchaser of fair trade coffee. And the company for many years has had a policy of contributing 5% of its pre-tax earnings to projects and communities where we do business, both domestically and in our supply chain. It's been divided pretty much half and half. Just in terms of coffee, and many of you may know this already, but coffee is often referred to as the second most heavily traded commodity in the world. It is grown by 25 million coffee farmers around the world. And when you include family members, you're looking at well over 100 million people who are largely, if not totally dependent on income from coffee. About 80% of these farmers are small-scale farmers that grow their coffee on two, three hectares of land and live in some very challenging conditions in some very challenging environments. About 2007, we decided that we wanted to dig a little bit deeper into our supply chain to begin to better understand what was going on at the household level. We've believed for many years intuitively that some of the best coffees that we purchase come from some of the healthiest communities that have the resources to reinvest in coffee. And we engaged an organization known as SEAT, the International Center for Tropical Agriculture based in Cali, Colombia, to help us in this investigation to better understand our supply chains and part of our supply chains in Nicaragua, Guatemala, and southern Mexico. And I accompanied SEAT in this. We decided to household interviews, one-on-one interviews with small-scale farmers using a questionnaire that had 22 questions that asked basic family information, farm information, and information about life in general, whether the family had any other sources of income, had they ever thought of migrating, had the farmer ever thought of migrating, had they had any health problems in their family last year, and if they have any periods of extreme scarcity of food in their household. And from this survey, once all of the results were aggregated, we learned that 67% of the people interviewed, these are small-scale coffee farmers, many belonging to fair trade cooperatives, had between three and eight months of extreme scarcity of food. And we were, I was personally taken back when I started to hear this from farmer after farmer and the company certainly was, and we began to think about the need to build resiliency in our supply chain starting at the household level. And our first investment was through a cooperant in Nicaragua called Secocafen and shortly thereafter we began to work with NGOs, NGOs like Save the Children, Heifer International, Mercy Corps, and Catholic Relief Services. And our first engagement with Catholic Relief Services was in Guatemala. Most of the projects early on focused on food security and the strategies that the communities seemed to clamor for was diversification of their sources of income so that they were not entirely dependent on coffee and the whims of the coffee market. Today we work with Catholic Relief Services in a number of countries. We started, as I say, in Guatemala, but we are now working on a regional program that includes Guatemala, Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Honduras. We also work with Catholic Relief Services in Africa again supporting food security programs in Ethiopia, Kenyan, Rwanda. The project focus, as I say, as I said, is primarily focused on food security, watershed management, and a very innovative micro savings program. So some may ask, well, why, you know, why CRS? Why did Green Mountain get involved in CRS? And one of the things where we work with many very high-quality non-NGOs, non-governmental organizations, one of the things that I think that is relatively unique about Catholic Relief Services is the focus on the coffee supply chain from seed to cup. And certainly many NGOs work in the field as CRS does with having technikos or extensionists who can provide some agronomy, agronomic assistance, but also assistance, not just for coffee, but also to help families develop small-scale food gardens and other coffee crops, other sources of income like beekeeping and so on. And then they also have some very innovative programs, again, the micro credit program, micro savings program. They have great information that they make available, not just a Green Mountain coffee roasters, but to the industry overall through a coffee blog that comes to my inbox a couple times a week, and it's very, very pertinent to the organization. They're also very heavily engaged in the Coffee Association, the Specialty Coffee Association of America, which is the world's largest coffee trade association. They play an active role in that organization. And they also do a wonderful job promoting fair trade coffee and have for many years here on college campuses and elsewhere where to help educate consumers are some of the challenges that small scale coffee farmers are facing. And finally, looking ahead, I think that some of the things that we are very concerned about as a company, and I think there's growing concern within the industry around the impacts of climate change. And I think perhaps the Leroy or the Coffee Leaf Rust that was mentioned in the introduction is of an urgent nature right now that is, I think, a disaster that is slowly, very slowly unfolding before our eyes. And Catholic Leaf Services has had a strong relationship with SEAT, who are agricultural researchers. And so the approach that Catholic Leaf Services has in terms of collaborating and in terms of sharing their research and in trying to pull things together to actually take action is really admirable in this organization that we're really thrilled to be associated with. Thank you. Thanks, Rick. Hugh, could you pick up where Rick left off and tell us a little bit about how the relationship with Green Mountain Coffee has evolved, but also just give us a little bit of context about your work in Nicaragua, because I think that may also provide some of the context for the conversation going forward. Sure, thank you. And first of all, thank you for the invitation. It's really an honor to be sitting here with Chisela and Rick, two great partners of CRS. And I appreciate you coming into this as well. Well, I wanted to talk a little bit about how CRS, from my perspective, I've been working with CRS overseas since 2000. So I've had a chance to witness how we've moved forward in terms of how we work with different companies, including Green Mountain Coffee Roasters in Guatemala and in Nicaragua in my time in both those countries. And I think that primarily our move towards working more and more with the private sector is driven largely through our agricultural work. Our agricultural programming, I'd say over 10, 15 years ago, really was focused primarily on supply and focusing on helping farmers increase their yields without taking as much into account the market factors as we should have. I think CRS was not alone in this. I think this is part of the way that the development community was working back then. And over time, we started moving more towards understanding markets, analyzing markets, carrying out feasibility studies, and promoting crops among small farmers that we support, where we see they're going to make, they're going to be able to increase their incomes. And then I think another shift came more recently, which was we don't want to just understand the markets. We want to work with the market. We want to work with buyers. We want to be partners with the companies that are buying. And we want to understand how they supply and we want to understand how we can help the companies that are interested in having more inclusive supply chains who want to bring in small farmers into those supply chains and say, because we work with those small farmers, we can help them achieve those goals. And we have those goals in common. And that's the type of shared value approach that we're looking for with them. And in here, we have two companies, two great examples of companies that are, that happen to be interested in working in that way. And so I'd say at the field level, that's what I've seen. And I'd say even at the sort of more the global level, CRS has shifted towards this too. We had a major event that happened globally for CRS. We shifted our board of directors about 12 years ago. We added on a number of lay members of the board of directors who were mostly business leaders and academics. And I think that helped to change our mindset a bit as well. And then some of our major donors, especially USCID, that started putting out Global Development Alliance, GDA, request for proposal, encouraging us to work with the private sectors. And I think all of this, you know, we see now sort of a convergence of what we see as necessary in the field and what we see as necessary globally from also from our U.S. perspective. I was lucky enough to work with, on one of the first programs that Green Mountain funded CRS with in Guatemala in a coffee community that was very, very food insecure and working on diversifying those producers' assets and income streams through finding other types of crops outside of coffee. And also forming savings groups, savings and lending communities, the silk groups, if some of you are familiar with this methodology, that I think is very effective also in helping farmers to protect their assets. And over time, we've built that relationship with Green Mountain. We've taken it across Central America and as Rick mentioned, to other countries in Africa. And I think that just as important as the funding that Green Mountain provided us, they've also helped us, some of our colleagues, especially our experts, Rick mentioned a blog that's written by my colleague Michael Sheridan, a little plug, CRScoffelands.org. It's really an excellent source of information on the needs of small coffee producers around the world. In particular, he's based in Colombia and he's focused on farmers on the border between Colombia and Ecuador, but he writes about the plight of small farmers, really small coffee farmers around the world. And with Green Mountain, through Green Mountain, we've really helped, they've helped us develop relationships with other coffee companies, especially coffee companies. And we work with them on the Special Coffee Association as well and Green Mountain's really helped to introduce us to other companies with similar interests. And from what I can see from the Philippines as well, Jolibi's really done a really important role that they've played is also saying, is being a champion for this type of relationship and saying, as Gisela mentioned, it's not easy, it takes a lot of work. It's challenging at times, but it can work. And what it does is very powerful as we're seeing. And so as a champion, they invite other companies to consider this type of relationship and they promote it. And I think these types of relationships also are really important for us. I was going to raise the question of the coffee blocks. I'm glad you raised it because I think that it just reflects the deep bench of expertise I was referring to earlier on. I was looking at some of your reports. The ethical agent, fresh flowers in Kenya, dried beans in Ethiopia, increasing food security through trade, these are deep. Now, I'm not sure I'm going to read these on Friday night, but I do think these are the sorts of things though that bring folks like Gisela to the table or bring Rick to the table. It's this deep bench of expertise that Catholic Relief has or my friends at World Vision have or Heifer International has, that there is a bench strength of technical expertise that is deep and overdone. And I think the fact that the blog is about, you guys have your fingernails dirty in sort of the day-to-day reality of what's going on actually matters. And if you're in Manila or you're in a small town in Vermont, you may have a theoretical idea of this, but actually you all have the reach and ability to say, this is how the leaf rust is impacting local communities. And this is what it's going to mean for your market. Or this is what the change in the weather pattern has meant on the ground in Nueva Asija, Philippines, and what that's going to mean for the onion crop going forward and how you buyer of onions for burgers, what that means. So the depth of expertise that is really quite impressive is business actionable information and is something that brings folks to the table. I want to, let me just go, you've just spoken, I want to just press a little bit, and you mentioned this about the shift in the evolution of the development community and thinking about agriculture and connecting to markets. Can you talk a little bit more about, was there, did that require a mind shift within the organization, at least at the field level, when you said, okay, we've got to go from increasing yields to something about connecting to agricultural markets. Did that either require additional skill sets at the field level or sort of new ways of talking to folks you hadn't talked to before? Talk a little bit more about that from a CRS perspective. Sure, thanks. Absolutely. I mean, when, as I mentioned, I mean, the focus has been on production, on increasing yields, and so your technical staff in that case will tend to be agronomists who are not necessarily business focused, who don't necessarily understand the markets as well. And so more and more in our country programs, we've been staffing up with individuals who are more business savvy, if you will, who understand better the needs of a small entrepreneur. As you know, now we're starting to look at these farmers, really, they're small businessmen and women. And it's not a coincidence that, for example, one of the director of our largest USAID funded program, now our largest USDA funded program currently, is from the private sector. He has an agronomy background, but he is from it, he's been working for private companies for years. And that's not a coincidence, because there is a need to understand market forces in the countries where we work. Can you talk a little bit also, as well as the role of, and I know Gisella has some thinking about this, we discussed this before the panel, but the role of local governments in, say, Nicaragua, in terms of how, has it had to change the way in which local governments think about how they connect farmers to markets, because not only had the official donor community had to make some changes in international development organizations like Catholic Release Services, but have you found that what communities need from local governments, has that changed as well or have they had to, in terms of accompanying smallholder farmers in this process? What using Nicaragua as an example, we recently ended a five-year USAID program where really our largest co-funder of the program were municipal governments. And it was an agroenterprise program, a number of value chains, and municipal governments put up millions of dollars of matching funding from their budgets to fixed roads, build roads, fixed roads, some small-scale infrastructure for post-harvest processing. They're a critical partner in this as well, and I think that it gives them something, it gives local governments also something very concrete to invest in, and then they can see direct benefits. And obviously the farmers help us advocate for them, and they go to their, I think in a lot of the countries where we work, these communities feel a lot more access to their local, their municipal governments or whatever the local unit is than they do to the to the national government. And so they can help us raise those funds also to complement the projects that we carry out. Let me go to Gisella and take about the role of local governments. And then I'm going to come to you Rick and ask you about how you've worked with local government, from your perspective, how local governments, how you work with them on sort of supporting local communities. But let me start with you Gisella. The Farmer Entrepreneurship Program has, my sense is that for you to get to source directly from small-holder farmers, it's required a whole systems change. It's required NGOs to, for you to work with a set of NGO partners like Catholic Releasers, is required a change though in helping to work with your procurement officers to say don't buy through traders or direct, through intermediaries, we're going to make a corporate commitment as a company to source directly. But it's also required some change for local governments. And then just just mirroring a little bit what you was saying about the role of local governments. I'm surprised in them. That's very interesting what you had, Nicaragua. But I think there's also been some shifts in the Philippines in your experience working with them on this project, on the Farmer Entrepreneurship Project. Yeah. The Philippines about 20 years ago had the evolution process where all agri technicians now are directly under the municipalities. So the Department of Agriculture does not work directly with the agri technicians. And in a way they've been left behind in terms of technology access, in terms of new knowledge. But they're the ones in the field and they're the ones who have people who can work with the farmer on a day-to-day basis. So what we're doing now is that we are training the agri technicians in this eight-step clustering process. They know production, but they don't really understand how that production translates now in terms of markets and buyers and things like that. So one of the things we do is we really, when we go to a site, and then I say we, I'll go back to that later. But when we go to a site, it's actually inviting the local government unit and the local microfinance institution if they want to be part of the project. And if they do, then that's when they start identifying farmer's groups who can work with them. The whole, for example, delivering to a company like Jollibee on a monthly basis is fine, but delivering to let's say a supermarket which requires supply every two or three days will require that farmers will have to do relay planting. And relay planting really requires a constant monitoring because if one farmer will not plant or will not be able to produce, then where do you get the supply? And that kind of monitoring is really something that local government unit agro technicians will be in the best position to play. I'd like to add a little bit on this discussion about CRS and its technical, deep technical expertise. That's very important. But I think in our case, what really has also attracted us in the whole partnership is that this kind of work, as I said, requires a lot of creative thinking and innovation. And parts of it will be negotiating at times. How do we handle these certain situations? And we've been very pleased that CRS has been very considerate in trying to be very innovative in all these things. The first of all, there is the convergence of our values and our commitment. And secondly, to always find ways and means to negotiate how we will now work in certain situations. So that at the onset, CRS was really the one setting and leading the program. But over time realize that we have our own specific expertise and influence also that we can utilize into the project. So that when I say now we, there's really a technical working group composed of CRS, Jolly B and LDC that sort of oversees the program on a more regular basis and not just let CRS do all the work. So in that sense, the kind of shifts in partnership arrangements happen, not just at the local level, but also at the overall program level in the way by which you will be able to accomplish what we set out to do. And that's the thing it's important to emphasize because it's very hard to work within very rigorous, very defined and set bureaucratic ways in doing things. Because once you go to the field, the situation is, you know, you cannot really figure it out. So that kind of flexibility, I think has to really be embedded in these kinds of partnerships as we move on to do more innovative approaches. Just so let me just take advantage of you having the floor from it and just talk a little bit about the challenges of sourcing directly from some older farmers. We are having this discussion and certainly one risk you can't have a hard time, one has a hard time mitigating is the weather. But the one that I thought, and the issue of quality, it seems as if you're able to kind of meet that, that's not the problem. And I think also something we can go back to Rick about on this issue of quality coffee and having a certain level quality. But what we were discussing before the panel was this issue of reliability. Could you just talk a little bit about the challenge of how you train folks or work around that manage this issue or bring clusters to a level of reliability that's suitable for Jollibee or for other buyers of onions and other agricultural products? Okay. So reliability is really not just in terms of volume, but also in terms of quality. They may have the volume, but it will not pass our standards. So in a way, it's also related to the whole production practice and how to make sure that the farmers are provided with the needed technical expertise. And again, it's not just about CRS doing it, but working with the Department of Agriculture on family farmer field schools, where they really train the farmers on the ground on how to do proper pest control, proper nutrients, et cetera. In some, but what volume is still essential? So what we also do is CRS teaches the farmers how to allocate a percentage of their total produce for Jollibee, but always to plant more than that. Always plant more than that because of the weather issue, so that at any point in time, they would have extra supply to source from. The other issue always in the question of reliability is polevolting, where when the traders are offering much higher prices and Jollibee would provide stable price, then what will they do? So again, the rule and the standard we've set is that you allocate 50% to your trader, to your middleman, 50% to Jollibee, so that you win both ways. When the price of the trader is higher, then you get bonus from there. If our price is higher than the trader, then at least you have something. So that's the kind of, so it's not exactly contract growing where we get all their produce, but really helping them to figure out in what way can I make money given certain conditions. And that's one of the things we've done that. So, Rick, we've talked about a couple things I think are relevant to Green Mountain Coffee. One is the role of local governments. Another is this issue of quality and reliability and how you work with coffee communities to make that. Obviously, as a quality coffee per cure, you're not just buying coffee willy-nilly. You have certain very exacting standards that you need for us to enjoy the kind of coffee that you produce, if I can put it that way. And you can pay me a fee for that later for having said that, but I do mean that. But Rick, if you just talk about, first talk about the role of local governments as you see it, because I think Gisella's outlined and you's outlined several roles in which they play in this. Talk a little bit about that and then talk about this issue of quality and reliability and how you manage that issue. So in terms of local governments, I think we see the role of local government as one of the keys to the sustainability of the work that CRS and other NGOs are doing on the ground, that you really need sort of a base organization that's going to be there from here on. Many of the NGOs that we work with are, you know, the project may be three years, maybe it's four or five years, but at some point in time, they're not there forever. And you need some structure, some support that can continue the work that's been, the groundwork that's been established. I can give you just a couple of examples. We do not normally deal directly with the governments. It's usually the NGOs that we work with, like CRS, who get involved with the governments. And however, we have had meetings, for example, in Nicaragua, we support a municipal water project through an organization called Water for People. And we have met with the water committee so that there's a clear understanding of what the project's going to be like. They have a clear understanding of the support that we're committing to. And it also is clear that they actually have some skin in the game, which is critical for the success of the project. The same sort of meetings I've had, just a few weeks ago, I had a meeting with a health committee of a local community in Chiapas, Mexico, where partners in health is working, where they have a clinic. And this committee plays a very, very active role in supporting the clinic, everything from making sure that the ward is out, both in terms of directing community members to the clinic when the clinic's open, when the clinic's not open, reaching out to the doctor who's in the community to let him know that there's somebody severely ill to cleaning the clinic, to maintaining the clinic. All of these things are organized by this governmental committee. And they play a vital role. In terms of the quality of coffee, as I say, we have felt for years that farmers really need a decent quality of life before they're going to be able to grow high-quality coffee on a consistent basis. One of the challenges is for a small-scale farmer is that he or she is unlikely going to go out and purchase fertilizer to feed the plants if he or she can't feed her family. And so we feel that, again, we've been really looking at the resilience at the household level and are hoping and we're getting some indication now that once farmers are able to meet some of their basic needs that they are able to, they do have more resources to invest in their coffee, invest in the quality of their coffee. And so we are beginning to see, I guess, you know, oftentimes you think of businesses investing in their supply chain, looking for oftentimes maybe a faster rate of return, perhaps investing in a processing mill or something that is going to have a more immediate impact on the quality of their coffee, but not thinking about the long term. And I think our approach has been, let's look longer term and we're now starting to see some of the results of that on a current basis, which is great. Rick, could you talk about, you had raised the issue of the kind of connecting with other coffee companies as part of, could you talk a little bit about that? Because I know Gisela also is part of the Farmer Entrepreneurship Program is also there's a bringing other companies a long component to it. Could you just talk a little bit about how you how you do that, Rick? I'd be happy to do that. Once one of the things that we learned when we learned about this issue of food insecurity was that there was a real disconnect with something that was so common in the households in parts of our supply chain. It was virtually unknown or unspoken of within the halls of the industry. And so we shared the information that we had learned through Seat at a Specialty Coffee Association annual conference. And the people who attended that session were as stunned as I was when I started to hear it from the mouths of farmers during the interview process. That summer, the Specialty Coffee Association came back, sent me an email and said, gee, your session was well attended. People really found it worthwhile. Would you come back next year and update the information? I thought, gosh, update the information. We can go re-interview and maybe the percentage will shift the point or two on either side of that. But rather, I actually had a conversation with Michael Sheridan from Catholic Relief Services while I was in Nicaragua. And thinking through, reflecting on that conversation, we decided to produce a short film, an unbranded film. It's called After the Harvest, which is available. You can see it online at aftertheharvest.org. It's a 20-minute film that brought the voices of small-scale coffee farmers along with some solutions in the field that was premiered at the Specialty Coffee Association's annual conference the next spring. It's narrated by Susan Sarandon, thanks to a partnership with Heifer International. That film, in turn, generated, again, the same type of reaction. People were stunned. They needed time to digest it. And I waited about six months hoping that my phone would ring, that someone would call and say, Rick, I want to do something. What can we do? Didn't happen. So I picked up my phone and I started calling colleagues at Starbucks Coffee Company, at Sustainable Harvest, at Pete's Coffee Company, at CounterCulture, Coffee Bean International. And finally, five coffee companies came together in Portland, Oregon a year ago this past February to talk about, was there something we could do together? And was there interest to do something together? And the companies within 20 minutes said, yes, let's do something. And it came known as the Coffee Land's Food Security Coalition that now has added two more members, S&D Coffee Company, which is a large wholesale coffee roaster in the Carolinas. And the Specialty Coffee Association of America itself has just joined the ranks. And we're now looking to grow this coalition. The coalition did fund together. We funded a project in Northern Nicaragua, a food security project. We're beginning to, we were on the phone yesterday with the, with the implementers of the project, which is Mercy Corps and Aldea Global, is the name of the local organization. And we're, anyway, it's a start. Justyla, I know that the Farmer Entrepreneurship Program has a component where Jolly Bee's leadership has been talking to other companies in the Philippines about the Farmer Entrepreneurship Program and talk a little bit about Jolly Bee's role in that and how that's, how that's evolved. Yeah. Well, we realize that, you know, our requirement as a food company will only be so much. So how do we now address the fact that farmers are producing other items and that they're producing? I mean, if you want to reach more farmers, how can we make sure that their produce can be absorbed by other, by companies? So because we have a number of food companies also as our own suppliers, we also started talking to them. And many of them are actually very interested because definitely they've been trying to work with small farmers. There's no way you can do, you can be in the food service, in the food business without dealing directly with the farmers. But they've always been frustrated at the lack of commitment, at the lack of, so when they now see and hear stories that farmers have been able to do that with Jolly Bee, then they become interested. But one of the things we also try to do is we try to also make clear that there is in a sense, it's business, but there's always a social responsibility component to it because it will require hard work on their part, meaning they will have to teach the farmers what are their specific quality requirements, probably bring them to the site, to the plant site so that the farmers get an understanding of it, making sure that they pay within the 15-day or 30-day credit limit. So there are some adjustments that need to be made and it's just important to also make that explicit because we cannot read, as you mentioned, it's going to go great, but there will really have to be some work done on both sides to make it happen. So right now, we've been able to bring other food companies, there's also a retail supermarket store that's on board. Other groups like those into livestock, those into fisheries are also saying, can we join? Can we join? I said, look, maybe it will be, we will focus first on horticulture, on fruits and vegetables, but look at this experience and see what now you can do in your own particular sector because that will be required in entirely different industry dynamics and all of that. Just to talk a little bit about the role of pride-eaters of of farmer finance because one of your partners is a Philippine Development Finance Institution that has worked through Catholic Relief Services as well as then it's evolved and now working with Microfinance Institutions. Talk a little bit about the role of this Finance Institution and then talk about the evolving role of CRS as it's moved from sort of being a provider of financing to now providing more of a technical assistance and convening power, if you will, because it seems as if that role's evolved over time in the Farmer Entrepreneurship Program. Right. You know, any entrepreneur will need financing in order to even companies need financing, but what's really sad is that there are no formal financing projects or services for small farmers. They've never seemed to be viable, very high risk. So what do they do? They resort to the traders who would provide them with the financing so that then at their harvest, they can immediately capture their harvest. So the Microfinance Institutions, which are really part of the network of National Livelihood Development Corporation, our other partner in this endeavor, we started talking to them to say, look, you know that you will make money out of this in the long run. If the farmers will be able to buy you, then you will do business better. But for that to happen, then you will have to begin looking at non-financial services, what we call business development services, which is precisely this, link teach them how to do the production analysis, the market analysis, coming up with an agro-enterprise plan. So what's happened is that these Microfinance Institutions have now expanded their business development services so that at the time when the farmers are ready, then they can borrow. And it's easy because the agro-enterprise plan teaches farmers to think in modules. So let's say 200 square meters of land. How much do I plant there? What is my estimated volume of produce from that? And therefore, if that's the case, what's my financing cost? So it's very easy now for the farmers and for the microfinance to compute exactly how much will they require in order to produce this much volume that they will deliver to Jollibee. That has worked. And over time, the microfinance institutions actually are starting to lend lesser and lesser interest rate to the farmers because of the good performance that they've been delivering. This is the kind of thing that we were very pleasantly surprised and therefore gave us also the impetus to consider that perhaps we should really work with local institutions and bring the capacity down there so that at some point, CRS and Jollibee and other partners can look more at knowledge management and convening and advocacy like this so that more and more resources or institutions or partners can come on board and therefore we can cover more areas. So from the field, it's now moving to a level where you're really looking now at capacity building and knowledge management and joint advocacy. Rick, could you talk a little bit about the role of financing for small holder farmers? I'm sure you work with Root Capital and others as well as you may also work through Catholic Relief Services on approaches to provide financing for small holder farmers. Could you just speak to that? Sure. Financing is, it's a huge problem for small scale farmers. Many of the farmers that we deal with, I would say most of the farmers we deal with don't have title to their own land and so it's very difficult for them to secure any kind of financing that's at a reasonable rate. So we have been supporting an organization called Root Capital which is based in Cambridge, Mass and a number of different ways. First of all is we've been supporting their financial literacy training which is targeted primarily at small farmer cooperatives to make sure that the co-op has a good financial management plan in place. We've also been funding another project from Root which is called Root Link which is helping to link the local cooperative with the local financial institution so that they can understand that the co-op does now have a good financial management capacity and also as part of that plan is developing an internal credit facility within the co-op and being able to manage that so that small scale farmers can borrow from their cooperative and for the purpose of oftentimes for diversifying their income to borrow so that they can begin to raise goats, raise bees, variety of different things like that. The final component this Root Link project was a project that we developed just a few years ago right when our US economy was on its way down and we were concerned about offering easy credit so farmers now have the capacity to borrow but do they have the capacity to manage those loans and so Root is developing a business in a box concept that will have probably about five different diversification strategies or opportunities for example like beekeeping you know what is involved what's the investment what is the rate of return when can the farm begin to expect to see a profit so that the farmers are going into some very specific business knowing what the tool what tools are needed and what their rates of return can be but it but it's a very very critical tool for small scale farmers and Root among other organizations as well do a great job. I think my sense is that Catholic Relief Services may do some of this on the ground and as well could you talk a little bit about how Catholic Relief Services thinks about small or farmer financing in terms of how because I got the sense from Gisella that at one point the beginning of the partnership for example the Philippines that Catholic Relief Services was providing financing directly to farmers or was a partner with the development finance institution directly and that that role evolved over time and that function moved to micro finance institutions could you just talk a little bit about how Catholic Relief Services thinks about small or farm or finance because I think that that would be interesting to understand. Sure yeah clearly financing is a critical piece this and you mentioned the five skill sets and for small farmers one of those skill sets is is a family farm financing of course if you can't find the financing you know it makes managing the financing complicated and it is as Gisella mentioned it's a huge problem because very few formal institutions see a small producer as as viable or credit worthy and so I said we look at it in two ways one is we we're not in the business of providing small loans but others are such as root capital which is also a partner of our so many of our projects and other smaller banks local banks as well are interested and so really our role in one way is to help prepare the farmers or the farm organizations cooperatives associations to be credit worthy. We've partnered with a number of institutions for financial literacy at the farmer level or at the at the organizational level and this is really critical and I think that financial financial institutions MFI's and others when they see that an organization such as CRS has trained the farmers has worked with them and not only in terms of financial management but also in the other technical areas of production they see that as as making them more credit worthy because I think there's a better chance of them being able to repay their loans after their next harvest. I said the biggest challenges in terms of small farmers is probably in in crops that aren't perennials it's a coffee and cocoa and others have a better shot at getting some type of financing because they're dealing we're dealing with the commodity and and it's when you start getting into crops that are staple crops beans vegetables onions and other types of vegetables that we work with shorter cycles that are more in some ways more vulnerable to short-term shocks due to to to climate that's when banks finance institutions start getting really really nervous and so but that's also an area that needs financing and so it's one of the places where we see ourselves trying to help farmers figure out how to access this this finance and invest in in tools such as small-scale irrigation drip irrigation water reservoirs the kinds of things that can help those types of farmers be more sustainable and deal with the climate shocks great I think we should probably open this up for uh to the audience because I know there are a lot of knowledgeable folks here we have a microphone uh and we have two microphones and so we'll take questions I see a gentleman here in the front row if we could bring the microphone here if you just identify yourself and great thank you great panel thanks very much is that on can you hear me uh Manny Nunez I'm director at the Inter-American Foundation um don't let the name Fulio we're actually a government agency that we fund development in Latin America and the Caribbean at the community level so my my question is two-part question number one you talked about Rick you talked about healthy communities and the importance of that you know about 15 percent of our portfolio is impacted by chronic violence in Central America when you think about that so how broad of a net do we need to be casting when we're talking about creating a healthy community beyond income generation options for them or you know from a business perspective how broad are you comfortable in casting that net do you need to educate all these environmental other projects my second question is you know similar to many before I came to the government I was in the private sector for years and years and years as I reflect on my experience there we had 60 000 employees a foundation I can't tell you that on a day-to-day basis my business decisions were necessarily affected by what the foundation was working on so your reflections all of you on that firewall that may still exist with some us multinationals or Latin American companies or any other companies around the world how do you start to chip away at that firewall and start affecting core business practices to get at some of the things that you guys are already seeming to have incorporated into your DNA so thanks and by the way many of our grantee partners are part of the grant or part of the green mountain coffee supply chain I'm very proud to say so thanks why don't we see if there's one other question I think is a gentleman up front here then why don't we ask the panel to respond hi Alex Peterson with international relief and development uh wanted to look at what long term is you're talking about um you know rick brought up climate change is an issue that we need to be looking at and if you're investing in a community for you know a five-year project or a 10-year project um I'm thinking of extraction companies who speak about their partnerships with communities being 100 years long and that's their viewpoint in terms of what they'll invest in their projects how long is your view for projects that you'll invest in um two years five years 10 years and how does that play with you know uh stockholders and the private the private sector and that end of it okay folks um rick why don't we ask you to respond first sure um so I have a broad the net um which is a great question uh I think that um that's still we're still wrestling with that to be honest I think that one of the things that we we our first engagement was very specific around food security and uh and through that work of course you run into the interconnectedness that exists in communities so a home that may be food insecure may also lack access to clean water may also lack access to water for drip irrigation if needed may also lack access to health to education uh financial services and the and the list goes on we have um focused ourselves at this point in time on those that I just mentioned um we feel there's um we only have a limited bandwidth however we're not closed to other um trying to help meet other help our farmers meet other challenges that may exist in their communities but those are the ones that we feel that we've we're starting with um let's see the length of the projects how long will we stay and that's a that's a great question um we have over the past few years begun to develop a a concept of trying to develop what we're just for lack of a better term calling pockets of progress so I can give you an example where we may be supporting a project in Nicaragua uh in in a community that is or in a community-based co-op that is maybe touching five or six communities in the initial uh the scope of work is perhaps for three years and rather than you know at the end of those three years see the the team that's been developed and been effective on the ground uh be dispersed and go work on other crops or in other areas we said well geez you know the communities that are just five six ten kilometers up the road have the same exact challenge why not let's think about expanding sort of the the radius of this base of support so that that team can be together to certainly deal with the new the new project partners or new families but also should the need be severe that they can still be available for the original the original communities don't want to create a thing nobody wants to create a sense of dependency at the same time if there's something that can be a question that can be answered why not be accessible and then hopefully this will begin to ripple out to other communities as well um rather than just being here here here here um being a little more intentional about or at least we're trying to be a little more intentional about how we move forward and i'm sorry i forget you know jisela why i think this issue of the foundation and the company we had this discussion yesterday what i think you were saying to me is that there's a business case for sourcing directly if they meet quality and reliability standards that there's actually a business savings if you can purchase directly from farmers as the as the procuring agent at and that there you can make a business argument for for your organization as well as a development argument and i think that's i suspect is where you answered it no but i think but talk about but talk but i think but i think jisela you you there's a but talk a little bit about how you make that argument to to folks in the company who aren't in the in the philanthropy side of the house yeah um actually when when we meet with the prospective companies to join to the program i sometimes bring my purchasing officer because they would be in the best position to actually make the case and and there is there is there are savings that they can incur from the whole process but see those savings does not come easy you have to work on it but that's a good way to demonstrate in fact that it does make business sense to the procure directly it's not only about the cost but also about quality and about securing your supply base which is a very important concern for any manufacturing company especially with climate change how do you now source from different areas you cannot just rely on your traditional sourcing areas because you don't know where what happens to the climate in that in that sense so that is how in a sense the project has striped it has definitely provided that benefit of the company but also i think what is good is that within the company there's always been the mindset to grow with small suppliers it's always about developing a healthy business relationship with suppliers so that as we grow as a company they also grow with them and and that approach i think has allowed us also to make it very easy to go and into this kind of thing i'd like to respond to the issue of how long again from the business side that's always a concern how long and what we're seeing in the with the case of kalasag for example under 50 or it is something already that we we would be able to leave them behind they can be they can negotiate already with other companies i think it will just be good to look in from time to time in terms of additional training as farmer leaders but the nice thing about this in fact is there is that sustainability component built into it you don't have to be there forever because as the farmers learn how to transact business then they can engage with whoever they want to work with what is just important again is that you also affect the enabling environment so that even if we're not there there are sport institutions that can continue to lend hand with them from time to time and and that i think is so the question of timing is in fact uh not so much of an issue it's just getting it started and then letting the whole process move on from there uh you could i ask you to talk about how at catholic resources you're thinking about um you have a a hold of development approach if you will you have a holistic approach to development at catholic relief services and so i think what what the gentleman from the inter-american foundation was getting at is okay how do you deal with some of these some other external challenges and i suspect you have to address that in your program and could you just respond to to his question from your perspective and then could you also talk about this issue of of length of time and also if you feel comfortable if you're responding to this issue of how you see your company partners at least from a field perspective how they make that business case if you if you will sure um well thanks for the questions um uh the first one was there was a first of three this issue of he was talking about security and the broader the the broader context in which you do development how you think about yeah i mean clearly the catholic relief services is a you know we're fairly large organization we have a broad poverty reduction mandate and in that includes agriculture but also includes other areas um speaking to central america uh some of the security issues that you mentioned are particularly worrisome for us especially in guatemal el Salvador and Honduras um and we address that primarily in our urban programming uh focused on on youth and and that has a very important private sector component to it which is working with uh companies to to hire some of these youth that graduate from our programs uh through uh different trainings program training programs that we have and obviously the catholic church has been very involved in this type of activity for for a number of years through number of congregations um but we also work with you know in terms of from the trafficking issues that that worry us uh labor rights uh activity so so there are a number of areas that uh that we work in that address some of these broader issues health and and water and such um we can't do it all we have to focus on a few things but uh but certainly we keep in mind um the broader issues and then try to work with other organizations that specialize in the different areas uh in order to to address them in in different countries or specific in the specific uh areas where we work within those those countries um in terms of length of time i would say it depends and however long we need to be there and fortunately we're starting to see uh for example in the case of nicaragua there's communities that we've been working in an agro agriculture and agro enterprise projects since uh basically since hurricane mitch in 1998 and uh recently we have a new program that started we're not working in in some of those communities anymore because they don't they just don't need us there anymore i mean they've they've reached a certain level where you know the support from our organization like ethical users isn't isn't necessary anymore and that's that's a great that's great to see to witness and um and it's very clear when you drive to those communities and you see it's visible from from the road you see the homes uh you you see the type of infrastructure that they have um you know and we were a part of that we weren't the only factor but we were a part of that and and so you know i think in some communities it's going to be longer than others i mean there are some communities are more isolated that are hard to reach it's more expensive to work there and a number of factors that make it more complicated certainly throughout the world different countries are more challenging to work in due to conflicts and and for other reasons so it's really it's really going to depend um for the context in which we work and then in terms of the business case and this idea of you know sort of the foundation side versus the uh the business side i mean i had this conversation with with rick before for for green mountain and and i think what's interesting for us is we're interested in working with both sides either one or the other or or both at the same time depending on what the company's interested in and in some cases we've been introduced one side introduces to the other so our work in the foundation led us to working with the supply managers um that's actually the more frequent route rarely do the supply managers send us over the foundation side um but but but we are interested you know and as much as the company's interested in working with us in the different areas we're we're open to and we we're looking for those types of partnerships on on both sides okay other other questions okay uh randy and and this woman here so why don't we go with this woman this woman back here first you can ignore my question if it's redundant who are you just say my name is alejandra santillan i'm a recent gdb grad with development studies so i feel like i know a lot about the development side but i'm curious about the business side so this leads to my question um since there's a lot of investment in the farmer communities with technology with building up their capacity and it takes time to develop trust for the relay planting to work and all this i was curious about uh something you mentioned just i'll let you said there's no contract farming so with all these investments going in why wouldn't you guarantee the market for them thank you let's get randy tiff's question randy's with with world vision great panel thank you a policy question if you don't mind so you mentioned a couple of you mentioned resilience in different ways household resilience um resilience in the supply chain us a id issued a resilient strategy in december and it's got a lot of support but it's also gotten a lot of reaction there are some skeptics who say well resilience can mean anything you want it to but in fact it is it sort of means the the integration and sequencing of interventions the right intervention at the right time early warning um and can and it kind of implies community-based uh development assistance so is that the lens looking across many programs you've been involved with is that the right lens and is usc id's effort with other donors we think uh to start to plan and program around resilience is that the right lens that's going to help you do what you want to do what you've described today i'm going to ask uh each of the panels to respond to both of the questions if they do but why don't we start with um i'm going to start with you first um i mean as you say the resilience concept includes a lot of a lot of the issues that we've been talking about so i do i do think it's it's a a good lens to use i mean it allows us to address um a lot of the different needs that farmers have in terms of shocks whether it be economic or climate or or other and um and you know it's it's a good framework um to use and as i think for the the community as a whole um we benefit from using similar language to and understanding what we're doing and and as i think these frameworks the advantage that they have is it allows us to speak the same language and and maybe including also some of our our private sector partners in that rick why don't i ask you to to respond to this resilience sure um i i uh have not studied usa id's definition but based on what what you've how you've described i would say that we're aligned with that um we are uh very concerned um as we look ahead particularly at at the coffee supply chain and the ability of that supply chain to be a long long-term supply chain um would given the potential um threat of climate change and we did a study actually with catholic relief services and uh and seat um where they did some mapping of of the coffee world in in central america particularly nicaragua and the collecting meteorological information uh from many many organizations around the world historical information current information and making some projections into the future as far away as 2050 um with a very narrow margin of error and making some assumptions that there's no change in human behavior that there's no introduction of climate tolerant um coffee plants for example uh the indication is that the land area in nicaragua alone that will be producing high quality coffee in 2050 will be 70 percent less than is currently available so um as that that changes basically what's happening is is that the coffee will grown higher and higher and up the mountain side it'll be grown at higher altitudes and we're starting now to see la roya the coffee rust disease um that has been primarily uh impacting lower altitudes again it's it's there's been a degree or two increase in temperature along with increased rainfall and that's now driving that disease up the mountain side it's happening much faster i think than anyone has expected and so um there's a direct we're very interested when in uh helping coffee farming families become as resilient as possible at the household level so they can stay in coffee we measure that um we have our own monitoring and evaluation criteria that that actually some of our large NGOs and small NGOs helped us put together including catholic relief services um where we measure very specific uh impacts at the household level at relating to the the areas that i mentioned before food security health um education and a couple of other financial uh services looking at the impact of those activities but uh anyway sorry for the long explanation but i think that that's an area that i think is vital for us in terms of our business rick can i just push on one issue of this um the climate adaptive coffee could you just talk a little bit about is that coming are there you can you imagine coffee beans that are designed and can you talk a little bit about what what that that might that future might look like sure um there is an organization that's been formed within the uh coffee specialty coffee industry funded largely by the specialty coffee industry called world coffee research that is very actively um working to research and develop coffee plants that will be high will be climate tolerant uh the question of course is what will how available will those be in terms of the when will they be available how available will they be and what will the quality be like i think there there's some major concerns around that but there are steps being taken but you know it's a race against the clock right well will they be gmo'd when you say gmo genetically modified well it depends how i think a little bit how you define that um i wouldn't rule anything out at this time okay be honest good okay just so i'm going to give you the last word responding to to that question but also if you wanted to comment on the issue of resilience to be welcomed to okay uh just on the question on the uh how i will where will we offer them uh where will we promise to buy them uh when we start with the new company we actually ask them to just allocate a small portion of the requirement from the small farmers so it's a way to test the capacity of the farmers and at the same time minimize the risk on the part of the company but what we tell them is that over time it will work then it can really grow into something more so it's not going to be a huge demand right away but start with small um on the resiliency issue i think this is something that we're still also studying especially because we're talking of short-term crops and not really perennials but we're hoping that the department of agriculture is one institution that can help us look into that also more closely and hopefully experiences from other countries as well okay folks please join me in thanking the panel