 We're going to increase the efficiency of our production, but we've got all kinds of challenges facing us. We're going to play in water, people, labor, everything. How are we going to produce that price? It's a major, major challenge for us. And that's just to say where we are, but we know that where we are isn't good enough. There's too much found nutrition in the world. We know that there are many played parts in the world where the production practices are terrible, they're damaging to the environment. So the current situation is not acceptable. Not to mention the stresses that are being put on it by the demands from the future. And the yield growth rates are nowhere near higher. So we've got a heck of a challenge in front of us as an agricultural research institution and the one I want to remind you that the world is expecting to come up with the solutions. Think about it. Is the world expecting Senjanta to come up with the solution? No. Are they expecting a university? We're going to go back to where you guys solved the problem last time around. What you've got for us this year. Which way to think about it is a pretty good position to be in. At least we've got a little sleep over tonight. I tell our owners, you guys, we need a second green revolution. And this one is going to have to be even more scientifically rich than the first one. And now I'm happy to tell them that the second green revolution, by the way, in case you haven't noticed, is already underway. When I say science-based, the question comes up, what do you mean, science-based? You know, in some parts of the world, science is almost becoming a dirty word. Anti-nature. We have, before us, tremendous transformation that can place an understanding of biology. Is there a biology of dead things? I don't know. A revolution of understanding of biology and genetics. What that means for transforming our crops. An understanding that there is a biology of the soil that can determine the sustainability of our production system. We have a revolution in computational capacity, data management communications, remote sensing, all of which allow us to answer and ask questions that previously were just wild speculation. We're able to address complexity in a way that we never thought we'd be able to do. And I also believe that we have the opportunity to get into the politicians, the policy makers of the politicians. People who formulate the policy and get them to understand that what is needed to feed their people, what is needed for stability, economic growth, and how we can provide that. It's not for us to make sure that message gets response. Nobody else has the information that allows that message to get out. If we don't get it out, we can't be surprised if it doesn't get out. Now we're not all very good communicators, the vast majority of us are hopeless geeks, but we need to be able to link with people who are good communicators so the policy makers can understand the opportunities that are there. One of the great opportunities is the genetic resources. Relatively small amount, only 5% estimated, has been used in our breeding programs. But that revolution of molecular biology and computational power, etc., is changing all of that. We have, last year, completed the sequence of 3,000 device genomes. I mean, that's a phenomenal undertaking. And we have developed a very sophisticated pipeline for analyzing the genetic resources using those to address the major challenges that are facing us. Putting together the pieces that previously were not there for assembly. 2002, just before I joined Yuri, the first rice genome was sequenced. Front page of science magazine. Front page. We did 3,000, and I called up my friend who was a correspondent. I said, hey, we got this. I just added that. But we have just an enormous contribution. All that's publicly available. And it was a team effort. I talked about partnership and stuff. Many scientists, theory scientists, scientists from around the world contributed to make this dream of sequencing the rice gene bank possible. And that isn't, and it's a pretty fair amount of data that we put together. We, we, I didn't have nothing to do with it, but we put together. So that's the, who was it? Mark Twain said, the only people who would be saying, we are newspaper editors of Pope and people with tapeworms. But anyway, 17 trillion, 22 billion, 1 billion, 694,246 data points for 3,000 genomes. I just think it's pretty amazing. And I just love this slide. Did you think about if you were typing that three nucleotides or three levels of the sequence a second, which is basically one DNA word, which is 20 words a second, which is about my typing speed, it would take you 170,000 years to type that 3,000 gene sequences. enormous computational challenge. But here is partnerships around the world and put together, put that data on the worldwide web. It's available, it's on the cloud, Amazon cloud. So that anybody in the world who wants to access that data and use it, besides the appropriate MTA, can use it. Now, this is one of, you know, there's a, I got a list about this long of things that drive me crazy. Somewhere on the list is, we can't do anything right. We were encouraged within the CGI system to sign open access agreement. They're all the data and everything we produce is open to the public. Okay, fine, that's not a problem. So we have this open access policy, and then all this data goes out on the web and it's public. And now people's heads are exploding because, oh, you made all that data available so the private multinationals can go and create products and then sell them. Then you don't want to make it available. Oh, no, you have to make it available. I get it. Well, actually, I don't know if you do get it, but you better explain it to me. Tomorrow is a priority, I appreciate it. But the point is that it is available out there and we made that available. But sequence by itself is pretty much, unless you're an evolutionary biology, biologists, sequence itself is not all that useful. You need to understand how that relates to plant performance and we made huge investments in putting the facilities together at Erie with our partners so that we can characterize the plants and we can understand their performance. And all of that leads us towards dealing with the challenges of plant change. All of the genetic information that we collect, the assessment of how plants perform are absolutely essential for our dealing with plant change. Increasing temperatures, changing rainfall patterns, sea level rise, intense storms, all require different kinds of rice plants that can withstand it. All the people we've been developing. So we're in the process of making our rice plant ready. The beauty of this, and I used to call it the convenient convergence, is that the same problems that were challenging poor rice farmers today droughts and floods are the same problems that will be challenging the world in the future of changing climate, droughts and floods. I thought it was a convenient convergence that we could work on problems that were critical to today's poor at the same time as we solve problems that will be basically the world because of the challenge of changes in climate change in 20 years. Convenient convergence. Then our war came out with this inconvenient truth and I had to stop using that. I was using the most convenient. So when we think about the challenges of climate change, storm surges, sea level rise, let's reflect on rice again. 50% of the increase in rice production in the last 25 years came from the delta countries of Asia and the deltas are by definition at sea level. Sea levels rise, you've got problems with flooding, you've got problems with soil. And flooding is a major problem around the world and back in the 1970s, I gave you that little diagram of a torturous development of somewhat rice, of rice power and rice. We've been working on this since the 1970s and in fact in 2006, paper was published in the journal Nature that described the fundamental physiology and genetics of flood tolerance. After multiple failures, we were able to sequence the gene and put forth some hypotheses about how it worked and actually at the same time incorporate that into varieties of farmers we grow. The original sub-water, the flood tolerance rice that we tried to develop, some of them tolerated floods pretty well, but they were essentially inedible. I was told once that they took the sample of this to people and said, how is this flood tolerance rice plugged in the paste and they said, took one bite and said this rice is so bad that a dog wouldn't eat it. I'm not sure if that's an accurate quote. They might have said I wouldn't feed it to my dog. But either way, pretty lousy. But the point is that, one of the points is, that the science that we had to do in order to create a flood tolerance rice was pretty sophisticated. It was so sophisticated that it made it into the premier scientific journal. And in that paper, there's all those comparisons. But in the same paper that reported the basic science, they talked about how you can take that finding and put it into varieties rapidly so farmers can benefit from it, the poorest of the poorest. I think that will stay in the test and time of being a landmark paper of what science and research for development means. Have you seen this slide many times? I like to say of course that the plots with the yellow labels have the flood tolerance gene in them. The plots with the white label don't have the, or the same varieties that don't have the gene in them. You don't need a statistician to tell you which one's better than the other. That was great scientific work. I saw this field in my first year as director of general. And when I went out, it stayed in the field of Dell and Sennacher. When I looked at that field, and I looked, I said, man, did I take the right job? You see that, and you say, this is transformational. If you know that the millions and tens and hundreds of millions of people who suffer from floods every year, we got some of them here. And this won't make a big difference. And in 2008, we took it out to Farmer's Field. We, again, editorial leaders, we took it out to Farmer's Field in eastern India. This is what the, this is what the field looked like after two floods. It looked terrible. It looked like this was, those were the flood tolerant varieties in the field. They were flat, I'm saying, piled up and then our friends, colleagues in India say, oh, just give us a chance, these little green shoots there. So this farmer, Mr. Paul, listen to us. He didn't plow in that field and this is what his field looked like in October. Complete recovery. Very decent yield. And that is moving like wildfire across South Asia. Bangladesh, India, Southeast Asia. Also in Indonesia, Philippines, and Vietnam. And I tell our donors that the day that Mr. Paul did not plow in that field was the day the Second Green Revolution started. These farmers were left behind by the First Green Revolution. They did not grow modern varieties because they would not yield any to a lot of floods. And I think that's just a phenomenal story but what's even more phenomenal is the work that our people did in looking at who was benefiting from this. This paper came out in one of the Nature family journals. Very critically reviewed, tough papers. And I've seen that last year, but the early last year, as when I received a scientific paper, I read the abstract and then go right to the conclusions. I'm a busy man, a busy man. And when I read that last paragraph, and it said, this study indicates that schedule casts are likely to be major beneficiaries in the spread of this material. I literally got my hair and my arms stood up. I said, yeah, this really is. This is the real deal. This is doing it. And pretty exciting thing. We're bringing hope. Changing lives. But it's not just floods. It's drought as well. Across Southeast Asia, South Asia, it's a major problem. And we've got drought-poor crimes. And these have been in the works for a long time. When Gary Attenham was here, he was working on these. He was instrumental in developing a material called Sibagi Dan, which is really going well in the Eastern Indian. I had, last year, visiting villages, but they were growing Sibagi Dan, and they were extant over the moon about it. Because if it had some drought, then it was giving a decent deal. And we sat down and we ate it. And I thought it tasted like cardboard. Oh. And then as I asked them, what do you think about the quality? And they said, well, it's a lot better than nothing. Well, you got one. What's really exciting though is that because we understand the mechanisms of drought and flood tolerance, we're going to find them. And we are now in the very late stages of preparing to release varieties that tolerate floods and they tolerate drought in the same variety. Because farmers, if you're living in a lousy environment, they add insult to injury, but they handed out that in those environments. Because you can get a flood in one season, and then later on in the same season you'll get a drought. Now we've got materials that we thought in the late 80s, early 90s, we're going to get drought and flood tolerance in the same variety. You're going to have to be committed because you're a complete fluid. Fact is now because we understand better the genetics, variability, physiology, we can do that. And that will be again another set of transformational technologies. And a few weeks ago I was in Odisha. Matthew mentioned I got to go out and talk with farmers, which is my favorite. And I was talking with these women and they had been growing the flood tolerant materials and they were really excited about it. They got great yields. It turns out paper that the same group that did the earlier paper I talked about, these people were adding fertilizer and the crops were getting better yields and satirized. I said, what are you doing with the extra money? They looked at me a little bit and I was picking the head which I used to be looked at like that and they said well it goes to our household. I asked the man, the man of the apartment had a women apartment. I asked him the same question, what are you doing with the extra money? And then for the man I kind of winked and said they were drinking a little bit and they looked at me with horror and they said are you kidding? It goes to our household, it goes to our family, to our kids. They said it goes to the household. It was to our children's school fees close, close. And this then clicked with some of the we went to pay for the seminar on the loop surveys from the Philippines. If you paid attention during that seminar it turns out that the little beneficiaries of the adopters of the Green Revolution were not the farmers themselves but it was their children. And that's what really hit when I was talking to these ladies that it's about the children. The farmers' lives are set. The adults' lives are set. It's their children's lives that will really change. And one of the women right in the middle of the prison she said to me also it means the end of poverty. And you know these people living in the middle of the world. And she said having a reliable harvest was the end of poverty. And so I asked, you know, what effect it's as well, it means it will always have enough rice for the whole year so it won't be boring. Another kind of indication poverty is all about. And it was pretty moving I have to tell you to know that I was a small part in what from her perspective was an end of poverty. But again, poverty is not just about poverty is not just about calories or kilos of rice. What kind of rice are we getting? We have created rice that has a zinc content. I have iron content. I have made a guarantee that if I could make it no we could address these major scourges of poverty. But it has to get around the world and rice materials have to get around the world. With our partners and Chris, we have set up a network where genetic resources can move from nearly a mile across our partnerships. These are essential to having the kind of impact we want to have. But it's also not only about rice. I'm going to go over time but then again I've got to go over time. There's a very long introduction from that. It's his fault those of you who transport a PBS who want to go after Mary and I hope you're in the door waiting. But anyway, managing the product is essential part of transforming lives. And the problem we have is that farmers fields differ. And the recipe in the past has been to have one solid recommendation for everybody. Everybody got to put three splits of nitrogen spacing is the same and irrigation pattern is the same but in actual fact we know that that's not the way the world works. We just have to have the way the tools and means to understand how to provide recommendations to go into individual farmers fields. So over 25 years we've been working across Asia primarily trying to understand what were the parameters that drove optimum yield in a particular field. I hope you picked up a pattern here over the last 25 years. I don't think I've talked about any significant piece of impact that we've had that took less than 20 years. It's a long haul. But anyway, we came up with our scientists looking at what made the fields different in terms of their management requirements. Came up with really quite a sophisticated tool to allow them to make recommendations or develop tools that allowed farmers to make decisions that were suitable for their fields. Came up with all kinds of neat manuals and CDs and all this sort of thing to help farmers make decisions. Didn't actually get out to the farmers very well. It wasn't until we started to pay attention to the mobile application that we encouraged some of our scientists that, hey, every farmer has a mobile phone. Maybe if we used the mobile phone as a means to interact with the farmer we could get information out to them and they could make their decisions providing the information from their farmers and getting the recommendations for their farmers. And that's the sort of thing that we've been doing. And it's actually going to pretty exciting, pretty exciting set of technologies that a farmer who's sort of literate, but probably got a kid who knows this stuff, how to use the phone there, they're quite sophisticated can actually interact with our systems that have 25 years of modeling, database management systems work and ask the question how much fertilizer should I put on my crop when and get an answer that the farmer could understand. And we're now working with our colleagues around the world Africa Rice colleagues in the South and Southeast Asia to adjust these tools so that they work for them. Phil Rice the partner I had called for the work was a critical working office technology so that it works. And it's been pretty exciting here because over the last year we can see that we have hundreds of thousands of Philippine rice farmers who are actually using this tool and because the numbers going up from year to year they're not abandoning it abandoning it, they're finding it worthwhile. And it's pretty exciting to be working with the Philippine Government Thorough Rice Department of Agriculture here taking this technology to the last mile so that the farmers can actually adopt it. And it's going to be growing sophistication crop manager and then a host advisor research. What I see happening is something that we did not predict when we started and that is that an entire business model will be built around this that there will be people working in the countryside who will provide services to the farmer. It won't be individual farmers but there will be people providing packages that will allow farmers to get good information about their crops in their fields. So it's pretty exciting the time of events for crop management. People generally think about agronomy and crop management except those two select people in this room it was pretty tall stuff, tall as dirt but in fact it's extraordinarily exciting. As a matter of fact today's soil day my wife, Kristen, reminded me of that as we were driving down the field and I don't know how she knew it was going to be soil day and I said, wouldn't you get the dirt on that? And they went down about as well with her as it did with you guys and there was no sense that you were in this room. But anyway, we see this we see the whole crop management approach changing dramatically as the years go by and I think it's the role of an institution like here to think the global level. And we were bringing together along with UNEP large companies in the private sector key national systems around the world to create a sustainable rice platform that will in fact provide the means to dramatically over very large areas reduce the agronomic footprint of rice production. Greenhouse gas emissions fertilizer runoff pesticide misuse etc while increasing rice production. And we know this is possible and it's going to require new kinds of partnerships not just the area with the national systems but a pretty significant investment of very large companies we see it in their financial interest to make it happen. There's a lot of changes in mindset in case you haven't noticed over the last decade or so a lot of our thinking has had to change to adapt to the new world and this is just one example. And it's really important that as we have these technologies that we can interchange our policy that we make sure that they have the information that they need to make decisions they need to understand if they invest in certain technologies how will rice production change how will rice supply change they also need to understand in any given year what their production situation is they they just you know look the country is harvested what we expect to yield to be what they expect to production A the problem we have today is the Ministry of Agriculture says we're going to have to increase our production by 25 1,000 tons per district in the next year yes sir and I'm sometimes to report the legal to the action data İyi Lee Lee Lee Lee Lee Lee Lee Lee Lee Lee