 I'm Dan Rondi, I hold the Shrier Chair here at CSIS. Thanks for coming so early for the creating shared value, the role of the private sector in agricultural development conference. We really appreciate our friends at Nestle for helping sponsor this. Thanks for doing this, Molly, and thanks Janet for coming all the way from Switzerland to be with us. I think some of the conversations we're going to have today build on the work that we've been doing here at CSIS on the role of the private sector in development that we've been doing in partnership with Chevron. My friend Joanna Nesseth is here and will be here shortly, but also builds on the work that she helped start here on food security as well. So I think this is a nice combination of a number of different things that we're working and it also builds on the work that we've done on youth in partnership with the International Youth Foundation and Bill Reese is here as well, so thanks for being here. So I think we're going to be talking about a number of very interesting pressing issues in development today. I think the common theme is looking at this through the lens of what is the contribution of the private sector and what is the contribution through a lens of what is described as shared value which many of you have heard of and you're going to hear a lot more about today. So without further ado, I'm going to hand over the floor to my friend Bill Garvelink who used to be U.S. Ambassador to the Democratic Republic of Congo. He's a senior advisor here at CSIS and also is a good friend and really knows these issues very, very well. So Bill, I'm going to turn the floor over to you. Okay. I'll stand up there. All right. Good morning. Again, thanks for showing up so early on a cold morning. I'm surprised you all have done this. And I think we're going to have a very interesting discussion in the course of the day and I think the keynote panel, the opening panel, is going to talk more broadly about the private sector and agriculture and as time goes on, the panels will be getting more specific. And as Dan said, we're going to talk a lot about shared value. And it's my sense that shared value is talked about a lot now. But it's not really a new term. I think it's a refinement of corporate social responsibility which existed some years ago and came into importance. I was looking, Michael Levitt's not here, is he? One of the early pioneers of corporate social responsibility and of course Nestle has a long history of focusing on shared responsibility and a particular focus on smallholder agriculture. But what I would like to do is sort of just with that, introduce the panel and I'll introduce each person now and we'll go in the order from Secretary Venom and to the ambassador for comments and then I may have a question or two or four of them and then we'll open it up more generally to everyone. I think you have the biographies of each person here. Secretary Venom was the Executive Director of UNICEF and before that Secretary of Agriculture and she was the Secretary of Food and Agriculture in the State of California as well. And next to her is Secretary Glickman who is the Executive Director of the Aspen Institute, the Congressional, I forget the exact title, close enough. And he was also Secretary of Agriculture before Secretary Venom. This is complicated. And he was in Congress representing the Fourth District of Kansas for, I think, 18 years. And so he's had a long history in government. Ambassador De Hinden, I'm learning his very old name, he was telling me, it's an ancient Swiss name and it's a very interesting history. He was the Swiss Ambassador to the United States and before that he was head of the Swiss Department of Development and Cooperation. So we have a panel with a lot of experience as donors and in government and multilateral organizations dealing with food security and nutrition. And so with that I will turn it over to Secretary Venom. Thank you. Thank you very much, Ambassador. Oh, I've got to turn this on, I guess, then you can hear me. And thanks to CSIS for hosting this meeting today on the important issues of food and agriculture and nutrition security. I look around this room and so many of you are expert in these areas of agriculture and rural development. And yet we see so much of the work that's done in these areas that really doesn't have the kind of coordination it should have. So I want to just kind of put a little landscape on some of the issues we're dealing with and then talk a little bit about the private sector. So we have, as most of you know, about over 800 million people in the world who suffer from chronic hunger today. Many are in rural areas and yet there are 1.9 billion who are overweight according to the latest WHO statistics, 600 million of whom are obese. An estimated 2.5 billion suffer from micronutrient deficiencies. Chronic diseases now account for more deaths than communicable diseases or hunger in the world. So for too long there's also been a focus on calories to address hunger and the conversation has to shift to nutrition. Some have estimated that food production will need to increase by 60 to 70 percent to feed a population of 9 billion by 2050. But this is based on the assumption primarily that people will continue to consume more animal protein which is arguably not environmentally sustainable or healthy and at the same time there is an estimated 30 to 40 percent of food that is wasted around the world. Water experts now believe we will fight, oh excuse me, on water agriculture uses about 70 percent of the world's fresh water yet nearly 800 million people do not have access to clean drinking water. And it's now believed that we'll fight more wars over water than oil. Droughts are impacting food production around the world from Africa to Australia to California and Asia and that continues. Agriculture is contributing to climate change, it's impacted by climate change, but with proper management practices agriculture can help address climate change with sustainable farming practices which capture carbon, protect soil and water quality and conserve water. The global supply of arable land is limited and there are increasing concerns about soil quality. Recent article indicated that 20 percent, nearly 20 percent of China's arable land is now contaminated. There's concern about land grabs while so many smallholder farmers, especially women, have no land rights. Food price volatility impacts global security. In 2008 there were civil unrest in around 30 countries due to the rising food prices. So these are just a smattering of the issues that we're dealing with. There are many and there must, as I said before, be coordinated approaches to addressing them. The landscape really is changing dramatically the way people are working together. Traditionally it's been about government works over here, civil society here, the private sector does things over here. I do think the landscape is changing and there is a key role for the private sector to play. I think social businesses have brought new thinking about how to use market driven approaches to societal issues. And then you layer on that the fact that many companies, as was introduced initially, are involved in creating shared value and triple bottom line in corporate sustainability. There are many concepts, but it's about managing risks and opportunities for growth and developing solutions that respond to the future demands of customers, other stakeholders and the needs of the planet. So as I said, the private sector has a key role and I wanted to just talk about a few ways that the private sector can be involved. One of course that we talk about a lot in agriculture is ag extension. So the private sector has been quite involved in this, educating farmers in good production practices and providing better seeds and rootstock increases both productivity and product quality. The company benefits then from a better and more consistent product quality and the farmers benefit from higher income and the ability to then better feed and educate their families. Truly a shared value approach. Recognizing that women make up as many as 70 percent of the small holder farmers in the developing world companies are implementing inclusive approaches for women throughout the value chain and I think you'll hear more about that in the next panel. There is also work with NGOs in working in extension organizations like TechnoServe has been very willing as an NGO to partner with the private sector. Technology transfers another huge area, whether it's improved seeds for drought tolerance irrigation technologies, there's social businesses such as drip tech which was developed in the Silicon Valley and is now working in India primarily delivering drip irrigation in a box to small holder farmers. Cell phones now provide all kinds of information to farmers from real time information on markets to banking information to weather. I became aware a few years ago of an interesting NGO private sector partnership when Erickson teamed up with the global humanitarian forum to put weather monitoring equipment on cell towers giving African farmers access to weather data that they had not previously had. So this was a good example of an NGO private sector partnership. The private sector has also developed technologies for precision agriculture many of which can be adapted for developing country farmers including a lot of work that's now going on on drones that are being developed for livestock monitoring and crop monitoring. The private sector is also providing nutrition solutions from food fortification to product reformulation to reduce salt, sugar and fat content. There's considerable focus as many of you know on the importance of nutrition in that first thousand days which is an essential time for brain development and many companies are investing in nutrition education. Social businesses such as Beyond Meat are researching plant based protein meat alternatives to address both health and environmental concerns. And there are even some young social businesses that are developing technology to cost effectively produce insects which are an important source of protein to as many as two billion people in the world. Did you get insects in there? I did. I told you I was thinking about it. It's true, two billion people. The supply chain, the private sector has a key role to play in developing supply chains, processing plant development and construction, how the private sector can look at how they're saving water as Nestle just did with a zero water plant in Mexico or in constructing a plant providing clean water for the community in which the plant is located. Good waste. The private sector can play a key role in storage solutions to prevent spoilage and insect infestation. Insects again. And there's increasing private sector solutions for risk management tools like crop insurance products are becoming available through the private sector for small holder farmers. So these issues of nutrition, agriculture, water, climate, energy and poverty alleviation they're complex but they're all interrelated and we must look at them as interrelated issues. We can't any longer afford to have piecemeal approaches. The solutions must be holistic. They must involve government, civil society and especially the private sector and creating shared values really does require shared approaches. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you to you and Dan Rundy and CSIS for inviting me, seeing a lot of talent in this room and Bob Thompson out there knows more than I think the whole room put together but although I won't demean anybody else here. And then Lisa Moon is here and she runs the Chicago Council on Global Affairs program on food security and just a little promo. We're doing our major symposium in April on the issues of nutrition and health and I encourage you to participate in that if you can. And but any event, let me build on what Anne said and a couple things. These markets in the developing world can become some of the most prosperous in the future with population and demographic changes. The U.S. agriculture exports to Africa have increased about 200% in the last 10 years, which actually isn't very much when you think about it, but the African food market is expected to reach a value of $1 trillion by 2030. So these are big markets and North Asia is now a bigger food market for U.S. farmers and businesses that North America markets in Asia will continue to grow. So when businesses look at Africa and Asia, they are beginning to see profitable markets and not just poverty alleviation. So I think that is good news. And companies are doing some great things in this area. Nestle has been mentioned. DuPont has been very active in the food security index. A lot of other companies in terms of helping entrepreneurial efforts. But I want to talk a little bit about the disincentives or the issues that we have to work on to try to build both shared value as well as business opportunities. And these are not anything secret. Most of you know all these things, but it can't happen without effective progress in the area of one, governance and corruption and contract adherence. So people are not going to invest if they think their assets are going to be taken away from them or expropriated or devalued or if the contracts aren't going to be worth anything. And that's a problem that's worse in some countries than the others. Governments try their best to help. Our embassies are doing their best. The private sector has a big role in this issue of encouraging more effective leadership training for prospective government officials, leadership training for people in food and agriculture efforts. And that's certainly one disincentive. The second disincentive is infrastructure. And I don't just mean roads. I mean roads. I usually, infrastructure, I usually say roads in refrigeration. But how you traverse the marketplace to get goods from one point to another, and then how you store them and keep them in good shape so they don't spoil. The Chicago Council just did a blog a couple of days ago which talked about the massive amount of food that's wasted in both the developed and the developing world. But this issue of storage and refrigeration is a big part of it. And how we can develop technologies, particularly small-scale technologies, to help people protect the value of their food either on farm or in community. The third thing is finance. Okay, so how are you going to invest? And how are you going to get investment at the local level, as well as taking your companies and from a top-down perspective, getting the appropriate amount of money into these circles to build systems, even at the small-scale level. And the fourth is the human capacity efforts and talked about extension. The US government historically was much more active in land-grant college relationships with both universities in the developing world as well as bilateral fellowships, Cochrane Fellowship in South Africa. These items have diminished rather significantly in the last 10, 15, 20, 30 years. So if you don't have the human capacity being developed, it's not just the US. A lot of this is developed on its own. Brazil now is probably, Brazil and China are the two countries that are actively more involved in developing human capacity. But when you develop human capacity, you develop relationships. And so I think that's an area that gets under attention and trying to figure out how the private sector can engage in this area with educational institutions around the world to further develop that. There are some positive trends and mentioned the whole issue of tech, communications, technologies, social media, cell phones, modern smartphones. And that's an antidote to some of what we're talking about here because that empowers people to do a lot of things, get pricing information, get technical information much more quickly. And the private sector has been very, very active in that as well. I want to talk about one other issue which I think is really important and that's the whole issue is of trade. It's very hard for agri-food businesses to be profitable in Africa and Asia right now because it's difficult to move products and food within and between countries. So countries have also undeveloped and inconsistent food standards and regulatory frameworks, which further complicates doing business. So I've mentioned the Chicago Council and their Global Food Security Project, which I co-chair with former Congressman Doug Behriter of Nebraska. So the Council today released a paper on how the US can partner with African countries to overcome some of these trade and regulatory issues. And I want to talk just for a second about what we concluded. First, we reached the same conclusion that many people in this room have already had, that businesses can advance food security and make profits by investing in agriculture and food sector overseas. You can do both. But business cannot be as active as it wants to be in Africa because of trade and regulatory barriers. The US trade relationship with Africa is almost entirely governed by the African Growth and Opportunity Act or AGOA. AGOA focuses on bilateral trade but does nothing to improve trade between African countries or solve standards and regulatory issues. It also barely benefits food and agriculture. In 2012 of the $52 billion in food and agriculture products that Africa exported, less than 1% were destined for the United States. And in that same year, only 5% of trade facilitated by AGOA was related to food and agriculture. So we've got a real structural problem here in building a trade system that allows you to build basically a business profile that allows you to grow, build businesses, employ people, small-scale, medium-scale, and large-scale. So we recommended a new framework for US-Africa trade relations that would have more benefits for businesses and food security. The proposed framework would prioritize getting better seed in modern technologies to smallholder farmers. We suggest a focus on regional trade, which would allow food to be moved more cheaply and efficiently across African borders. And we lay out methods for improving the legal environment in Africa for reducing vulnerability to ad hoc government interventions that restrict African countries' abilities to import affordable food. So if you read this paper, there's a lot talking about a new US-Africa food dialogue advancing regional integration of food dealing with technical regulations and standards. But in addition to that, the US government doesn't devote very much resources with respect to trade when it comes to Africa. USTR is notoriously understaffed in this area. Through trade promotion authority legislation, Congress can authorize more staffing in USTR for this purpose. Congress should also ask the newly created undersecretary of trade at USDA, which has not really been implemented yet. It's in the statute to take the lead on interagency coordination of food and agriculture trade issues as it affects to agriculture. So right now the WTO is almost paralyzed on a lot of these issues. And so the US government must shift its focus towards regulatory and standards issues, and that will allow the private sector to be better able to pursue profits and advance security, food security, in some of the world's poorest and yet most promising regions at all. And the role of the private sector in this is really paramount. 30 years ago, I don't think that the private sector has ever really consulted on any of these things. But now companies, if they want to add value to their business plan, have to be actively engaged with the US government. Finally, let me just make a couple of quick comments. One is USAID, and my judgment, is remarkably better than it was 20, 30, and 40 years ago in this area in terms of working with the private sector. Under Administrator Shah's leadership, I think there has kind of been a revolutionary attitude change on that relationship. And I hope his successor continues this forward. And finally, I want to just lay out a plea that there are a lot of best practices happening out there. Anne's mentioned Nestle, DuPont. There are a lot of companies, small, mediums, large-scale companies doing great things. There's got to be a way to share those best practices in a way that others can kind of pick this up without reinventing the wheel. And we really have to make this a high priority. Thank you. Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be here. I will speak from the perspective of someone who was head of the Swiss Development Corporation running programs, but also having been involved in a lot of multilateral discussions on the issue. And, of course, also as a person who is convinced that public-private partnerships are important and help to solve poverty. The year 2015 is, in my view, crucial for sustainable development. The millennium development goals that have shaped many policies in development countries, but also in the donor countries, reach their expiration date. With a strong focus on social issues like health and education, they were instrumental in reducing by half the number of people living in absolute poverty. But despite this historic success, the continuation of current policies would not bring us much further in the eradication of poverty. The broad and well-informed international discussion over the past years has demonstrated that a paradigm shift is urgent now. There will be no end to poverty without economic wealth and growth. And there will be no decent future at all if the environment degrades. During the many discussions I have participated, particularly in the context of the United Nations and World Economic Forum, it has become obvious that governments, international organizations, civil society, and the private sector will have an important but distinct role. And, Secretary Weneman has underlined this very well. If not, we're not in a position to deal with future challenges like climate change, food security, water and resource scarcity. Most remarkably, the concept of creating shared values starts from a different angle, but addresses similar challenges. That is excellent news and a good omen for a paradigm shift to be successful. There is a strong hope that public policies can be consistent with what the most advanced and foresighted entrepreneurs have identified as the future of their business. That does, of course, not mean that a new mindset is already established or can be taken for granted. The old shadows have not gone away. The anti-business activists and also neoclassical economists will still see private companies only as prunters of profit, even if they have very different ideas what to do with the profit. Nor will it be easy to walk the talk. I would be now intrigued or embarked on conceptual thoughts, but I know also that I have not been invited for this as a scientist or a scholar, but I will focus on a couple of examples of experience we did the last years. Since my country is a strong supporter of market economy and free enterprise, Swiss public aid programs have always been more open to cooperation with the private sector than the average OECD country. However, a positive attitude towards the private sector does not automatically result in common and successful undertakings. A government agency has its own policy objectives. In many ways, they are different from the objectives of a private company. Typically, development agencies have a strong ingredient of other foreign policy priorities. A private company rightly focuses on market opportunities. It is not charity, and if it were charity, it would not be interesting as a partner for Swiss Development Corporation. What we saw in our undertakings with the private sector was primarily their distinctive knowledge about markets and very often their unparalleled technical knowledge, which is the basis also for their economic success, for the economic success of the companies. Even if money is needed to ramp public-private development partnerships, our main contribution was not funding either. It was and is knowledge of the markets for the poor and familiarity with poor people's living conditions. Sometimes also privileged access to government institutions. Both partners, public and private, must find an advantage in the cooperation that goes beyond financial, reputational or charity issues, and they need to be clear from the beginning. Let me give you three very specific examples. For many years, we have run an interesting program in rural development with Nestle in Pakistan. It is much older than the term and concept of shared value, but for us it was an excellent lesson learned that helped to break new ground in our operational work and in our thinking. We were interested in promoting family farming. One of the reasons was job creation opportunities, but at the same time it allowed us to address many other issues like the role of women in society and environmental concerns. Nestle had a dairy production business and was interested in extension services, in capacity building among farmers, and that would allow them to supply milk with the required quality. The extension service was our role and our long-standing business. The program gave eventually hundreds of thousands of people a living and had an impact long after it came to an end. Recently we worked with similar projects in the area of flagrances in Haiti as in financial services, but much less known Switzerland, Swiss companies are key players when it comes to flagrances and perfumes as a wholesaler, not so much with the specific brands. The second issue is about skills development. Many developing countries face a dramatic shortage of skilled labor that limits foreign investment, but also the development of the local economy. Very often public training programs provide not the right cutting edge education. Private companies have the access to a much more advanced kind of knowledge that is useful in technical and technical training. So we built up, for instance, in South Africa, but also in Eastern Europe, a kind of technical education programs. We would not have been in a position to without the public-private partnership. Micro-insurance, the lack of insurance plans, and this has been mentioned before, for small farmers make farming risky in many places. People abandon even agricultural territory which has negative effects on urbanization, food security, and indeed on the natural environment. That being said, it is not possible to run insurance models as in Europe, the United States, or as for big farming enterprises. That unsolved problem was the starting point for our cooperation with a series of insurance companies, including Swiss Ray, Allianz, and Zurich, Zurich, which is, by the way, the biggest foreign insurance company in the United States. The Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation could never have afforded the technical skills and the knowledge to develop viable business models. The insurance partner found it difficult to work on the ground in remote, underdeveloped, and sometimes dangerous areas. The benefit for both is obvious. It is about both developing markets and eradicating poverty. It was about maintaining jobs and preserving soils and natural resources. The last of my three examples show also sometimes else that is important. When I was responsible for development cooperation in Switzerland, we focused on areas where Switzerland has comparative advantages, and this is inter alia in financial and in insurance services. I'll come now with a quotation. Every individual necessary laborers to render the annual revenue of the society as great as he can. He generally neither intends to promote the public interest nor knows how much he is promoting it. He intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which has no part of his intention. This has been, as you have realized, written in 1776 by Adam Smith. He explained to his contemporaries the benefit of capitalism and its potential for the wealth of nation. Adam Smith's time and thinking have gone with the shadows. The world we are called up to understand and to shape has little in common with the days of British enlightenment. However, Adam Smith's much more than many of his later disciples was always aware of the ethical, philosophical, and psychological underpinning of his thinking and of its historical limitations as well. As a scholar of moral philosophy and economics, he would have loved, of course, to take part in today's discussion. Because it is, after all, as Michael Porter and Mark Kramer wrote in their famous article on creating shared value in the Harvard Business Review about resetting the boundaries of capitalism. And it is about ending poverty as well. Thank you very much. Thank you, and thanks to each of you. And we're going to open this up to questions, but I'm going to ask one first of everybody just to comment. And then we'll turn to you all for a few questions. You all mentioned some of the challenges of the private sector engaging with governments in and with international organizations in food security and agricultural development. I wonder if we could follow that a little bit and say what and see what other challenges there might be out there to the private sector engaging more in agricultural development. I think I've run into a number of companies where shared value is a shared concept here, but it's not necessarily a shared concept to other companies. And unlike Nestle, there are a number of international businesses that don't focus too much on shared value. And is that due to a philosophical issue or are there other government or international barriers to that? And then so the flip side of the question is what can the private sector, its health do, to get much more engaged with government and international organizations to promote shared value and agricultural growth and development, fire away. Well, I'll start. You know, as H.L. Mankin once said for every complicated problem, there is a simple and a wrong solution. So I'm trying to figure out what is the simple thing I can do to answer your question. You know, I participate, I see Deb at what is here. I participate in a project called Agree, which is basically an effort to try to collaborate between differing institutions, big corporations, smallholder farmers, NGOs, Gates Foundation. It's a lot of its foundation funded. And the idea was is that if you get all these parties into the room and they talk to each other, you'll be able to integrate their thinking and maybe get something done in areas that you couldn't get things done before and move governments. In some cases you have to go around governments to get things done. And so I think that that concept of what I call interdisciplinary collaboration between the parties that really care. So who are they? Well, they are some of the foundations that are really in this world. Not just to pick on Gates, but Gates happens to be one that's most involved. But there are a lot of foundations and NGOs in this world. There's the United States government and the British government and other governments that are actively involved in this, that are doing it for the, you know, certainly the right reason. And then there's a lot of money to be made. I talked about the fact that I think it is in the African food market is expected to reach a value of $1 trillion by 2030. So that ought to inspire a lot of people to engage where they can. And so there's no one magic answer, you know, but I think that's why different strokes for different folks, different countries will produce different results. They have different problems. And so this is gonna be trial and error. There's no one size fits all, but there is enormous opportunity out there. And the private sector is gonna find this opportunity before the government's gonna find the opportunity in my judgment. I think, I agree with Dan, as I always do. But I think there has been traditionally a lot of distrust among the various institutions in working together. I think that, you know, as we see today, a lot of coordination going on among NGOs, international organizations, the private sector, even governments, it doesn't always translate into the field that way. In other words, the people on the ground, because there's been a distrust, you know, people that work for civil society have always distrusted anybody that wants to make money. And people who are in business distrust the NGOs because they've traditionally played gun of a name and shame game. And so I think one of the things we have to do is to build that trust. And we see that changing. Environmental groups are helping businesses now to build new ways of addressing water issues or other environmental issues in the field. We particularly see it coming together with environmental organizations, but also now more and more with development organizations. I think social businesses, I mentioned them briefly in my remarks, but I think they've played a key role. Really looking at, you know, how do you bring sort of business-like approaches to development? And there's a number of great examples out there. I think an area where you can really see governments, the private sector and civil society coming together on a policy issue is on land rights. I think this is happening in some places but not nearly to the extent that it should. I mean, when we look at the issue of land rights and the fact that farmers can't get credit without land rights, women, you can't transfer property, women are often excluded from owning property. And there are NGOs that work on this issue. Governments need to be to understand how to put together good land rights policies. That's certainly been part of the MCC's approach and helpful in that regard, but the private sector can play a role in this too because it's to their benefit to have stability with those who are creating their input products. So I think building trust, building ways in which the civil society government and the private sector can work together is critical as we go forward. Thank you very much. I will speak about distrust as Secretary Weneman did. I think this is to a certain extent a key point. For me, a major challenge is the mindset. We have about 10 years ago discussed a lot and are still discussing a lot about the corporate social responsibility concept. There is nothing wrong with making companies accountable for their behavior with regard to human rights, with regards to environment, but if you look at the paradigm behind, it is the paradigm of a company that is not intrinsically good. That is rather intrinsically bad and you should come with a scheme that limits to a certain extent the activities. And for me, the concept of shared values is something else. And this is the reason why I refer to Adam Smith. It is showing that the company, by pursuing its own objective, creates a benefit for the society. And this is a kind of paradigm shift I think would be good to do in the discussion about public-private partnership, but it is not done enough. The second point I think has been mentioned by Secretary Glickman in his intervention. The traditional role to a certain extent of the government was to create a decent environment for economic activities. I think this is still true, but we are living in a new world that we have to reinvent it. And corruption in some places, even failed states, a legal system that is not working, and so on, are enormous impediments, are hampering investment, are hampering development, and eventually lead us in a situation where people remained in poverty. So this is for me a priority. And if you go back to the Millennium Development Goals in all those areas where you have conflict, crisis, and fragility, none of those eight objectives have been achieved. Can I just offer one other thing? This is a little bit parochial, and everybody is instrumental important, but the significance and importance of the role of the United States government to provide leadership is really critical. And the classic example is PEPFAR and AIDS, where President Bush created an environment, and other countries were involved, but created an environment where this was important, that we were gonna alleviate AIDS and malaria and TB, and granted, the medical issues are a lot more easy to refine and define than a lot of the food security and agriculture areas. And other countries are in great leadership roles, with the British and the Brazilians and others, but so I wanna just kinda reinforce my hope that what follows on Raj Shah's departure and what follows on the departure of this administration, as Ambassador Garvelink knows, because he was very much a part of it, it can be inspirational and catalytic to get the private sector engaged, because it has been. Okay, let's open it up, and we'll take two or three questions, and then we'll see what time we have left. Two questions, all right. In the back. Good afternoon, my name is Rosemary Seguero, I'm the President of Hope for Tomorrow, we are a civil society organization, based here in Washington, DC, and I come from Kenya. Thank you so much for your presentation, looking at and most of the organization, big guys organization, which is the private sector, public sector, there is that mistrust within the big guys here, giving donations and the other recipients who don't want to work with small organizations in the rural areas who do more work with farmers and small businesses. So that coordination and cooperation is not there. There's so much money that has gone in agriculture, to pick organizations in Kenya, and all the offices are based in Kenya, I know them, I don't want to name them here, but they don't get to the rural area people where we have 75%. How do these people get help working with us? They don't want to hear that. So if they don't want to hear that, how do we fight poverty? If we don't know who gave them the money, we know who gave them the money, how many millions they have, and we still talk about poverty. So this is very, very bad and, mistrust, they don't want to give the money, they don't want to, we work like volunteers for them, giving them information, they come for more money, for money to nation, and there is nothing that is happening on the ground. So how do we deal with this situation in Africa, as a whole, even though I'm in Kenya, how do we deal with this, and how do you work with you as civil society who want to make and fight poverty in Africa? Thank you. Okay, why don't we take a couple more? Why don't we bunch a couple? Jim? Okay, Bob Thompson, Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. One point I didn't think came out strongly enough of creating shared value is the important role the private sector has to play in creating the jobs that are going to be necessary for ultimately to solve the problem of rural poverty. No country in the world has ever solved the problem of rural poverty in agriculture alone. Developing agriculture is essential. Raising productivity, but every country that's made significant progress in reducing rural poverty has created non-farm employment opportunities within commuting distance so that the majority, the small holders end up earning the majority of their income from non-farm sources. And I don't think we can expect it to be any different in low income countries. No government can create all the jobs it's gonna take to do that. Government has to create the enabling environment or the investment climate, but only the private sector can create the jobs that are gonna be necessary. Yes, in the back. Thank you, Alisa Moon with the Chicago Council. Several of you talked about just the opportunities or the very exciting things that are happening with private sector investment right now. I know Secretary Veneman, you mentioned just a lot of these social enterprises that are popping up, and Secretary Glickman, you also mentioned just the challenges with financing. Could you just speak, if possible, a little bit about what opportunities we might have related to accelerators? I know GAIN, for example, has launched in three countries in Africa kind of these marketplace accelerators to try to increase production of nutritious foods and help growers and processors and retailers who are focusing on fruits and vegetables and other things like lentils and that type of thing to help them get the technology they need to be growing it most efficiently that transportation equipment. I know that those types of things are proliferating across the US, but is there an opportunity for us to do more of that in countries in Africa and Asia, and how might we do that? Thank you. Well, now let's, I will turn to you guys to answer any or all of them of the three questions. Ambassador? Yeah, thank you, Mayor March. I would like to give an answer to the question that has been asked first by the woman from Kenya. I mean, you are concerned about aid not reaching the poorest people and by this not really reducing poverty. And of course, this is a major concern that we have seen in many places that aid money does not as planned change the living conditions of the poor, but the cooperation in between government institutions and the private sectors is very well suited just to address this. We have seen in areas of fragility and conflict very often private business activities are the only activities that are there. And I mentioned you before that in those areas, the poverty is the biggest problem, much bigger than in any other place. And the second issue I would also refer you to the setting we had in our project with Nestle regarding small holders. It was exactly not about building a big farm, but it was about including small and poor people in a value chain. And this could only be done in a setting of public-private partnership, even so the terminology was different at that time when we ran this project in Pakistan. Thanks. I'd like to address that question as well. And also let me just first comment though on Bob's comment, because I think that's absolutely essential. How do you create jobs in rural communities that supplement farm income? And I think a lot of the food companies actually do that when they build a processing plant and they integrate that into the community, they may along with that bill, provide clean water or even education to the community or some healthcare, all of that has a ripple effect. And so I think the food sector, it's not just about the extension to small farmers, it's also about the plants that are built and how those can then create economic opportunity for whole communities that may not have had it otherwise. I want to go back to this question from the woman from Kenya because one of the things I saw when I was at UNICEF is that you're absolutely right. Oftentimes because agencies like the UN or development agencies have so many rules and regulations to grant money to other organizations, which is primarily the way they do it, the smaller organizations don't have the capacity to comply with the requirements and to make the applications. And so often those smallest, most interlinked with the community organizations don't have access to the resources that are actually given by development agencies and UN organizations. And I used to try to figure out, was there a way we could have a bit of a fund that our country directors could have a little more leeway with so that they could actually provide some of these small organizations that couldn't do this? I'm sure you saw that as ambassador as well. But it is an issue and it may be an opportunity for the private sector when they're going into the smallest communities to work with farmers, to look for these indigenous organizations and say, how could we just give them a little bit to interface and do some of the education that we need to do? And then, Lisa, I'm not really sure how to answer your question on accelerators, but I think more and more we're seeing new kinds of investment based upon what kind of results are people getting, not just on the bottom line, but real shared value approaches. And that's why as I brought up the idea of shared value, which is, and like concepts in many companies, I think another real driving force has been the way social businesses have come in to really drive the shared value approach from the standpoint of how their business model has developed. I just can't add too much to what's been said before. A couple things, I still believe the data collection on best practices is not as good as it ought to be. I mean, there needs to be a way to transfer information. It's pretty easy to do these days because technology is there. So we can figure out what is being done in one country, what is working, what isn't working, what inputs were needed, what financial tools were used, and you don't have to reinvent the wheel everywhere. The second thing I would just mention is leadership and all these things. So some of you may know Cully Bomba. He's an Ethiopian. He runs the Ethiopian Agriculture Transformation Agency. He was a former Gates Foundation employee. He's a very, very brilliant young leader, and he has helped facilitate the development in Ethiopia of these extension networks all over the country that do two things, their agriculture extension and their health extension and their combined. And his goal in this is to promote leadership, to get people into these centers and then help them kind of inspire them to be what they can become, so to speak. And so one of the things, whether it's in what Lisa said or even in job creation, is there's just an enormous amount of talent, particularly in Africa, entrepreneurial talent, people who want to achieve. How do you develop that talent so that they feel the spirit moving them to kind of do the things that we're talking about today? That's a real challenge. I spent some time at the Aspen Institute and the Aspen Institute, its foundation historically has been in leadership development and training, not just in agriculture, but leadership and government leadership and private sector leadership and ethics and morals and that kind of stuff. And so that has to enter this picture as you look at how you're gonna develop a job promoting environment or an atmosphere to do the kind of thing Bob Thompson just talked about. Well, I know we've run out of time and there are other panels to come this afternoon and the rest of this morning. So please thank each of you for being here and for your thoughtful comments. Please join me in thanking the panel. Thank you. Thank you.