 for the future, and I assume the card has this on their agenda, but it seems to me that two big questions for the African rice sector moving forward is, are you going to favor large farms or small farms? Are you going to try to go with 50-hectare farms with this core management input, bringing finance and basically turnkey operations that can produce high yields reliably with good access to markets and good information? If you like a plantation approach to growing rice, or are you going to do this through the existing network population of very small farmers who are under-capitalized, who have very little knowledge? There are good rice farmers in Africa, but most farmers in Africa do not have much experience growing modern high yield rice grains. So the first policy question is going to be, are you going to push this infrastructure investment and development in favor of a large farm sector, or are you going to try to figure out a way to get this to small farmers? Prabhu's speech and the line at the World Food Prize in October said, so small farmers can do this. I believe that small farmers can do this. I am not at all convinced that African governments can do this. They have not shown a whole lot of skill at bringing small farmers into a highly productive farm market private sector driven economy. So that's going to be a real challenge. That's our goal. Then we need to figure out how to talk to governments about getting small farmers productive into the system. Second point, I'll quit then. Are we aiming primarily at increasing rural rice consumption through production in local areas by small farmers for subsistence, or are we aiming primarily at the rapidly growing urban rice consumption much of that supply by imports? And so we would see this as an import substitution approach rather than a subsistence approach. I understand that you've got that question on your agenda. I would love to see you do both, but my guess is that resources are going to be scarce. Policy attention tends to get focused, and so I think you're going to have to face that one way or the other. I was going to close by talking about all the problems with the rural rice market and the facts, the instability and the unreliability of that market pushing Africa to improve its own rice productivity simply as an insurance mechanism against being dependent on a highly risky, not untrustworthy and unstable rural rice market. Much of my time out here in the last couple of years, and I expect the next few years, I'm actually trying to make the rural rice market more stable, more trustworthy, more accessible, and so I'm actually hoping to solve some of your problems from the outside rather than from the inside. Let me stop at that point. Thank you. Questions? I can see still the pessimism about Africa, and whether or not it is effective to have a price for it. You're tough, but I won't say it's pessimistic. They're just tough questions. Yes, and we'll pay attention to that as I said earlier that that book has shaped the opinion and the policy of many organizations. I think I will now open the floor for debate. I guess I'll put forward some of the questions that you have raised on this whether or not Africa will be consuming 100 million tons. You say no, that will not be the case despite the growth. Why not just lie and try it? What's wrong with that? But still all the answers, and also you say the technology is there, but there are other which are not there and I wish you don't think that it is going to come so easily. Infrastructure, a milling especially, irrigation and then also policy. And what should be the strategy whether it is trying to import to JF, import substitution for the human consumers or focus on the workers. I think those are very good questions to start our debate. We have our first speaker who left because he had to go to America. We are two speakers and also I think there are many now who know a lot about Africa. So I will take two and I will start with Sir Andrew. Sir, can you hear me? Yes. Let me start where people have thought and that is that the two, the world's two largest importers of rights are Nigeria and the Philippines. For all the same reasons, the Philippines would like to be self-sufficient in the rights of the void, but that's not going to happen either and it's not going to happen in Nigeria. So we are sort of in that but there is one other thing that we haven't discussed and that is Asia is running out of water and you need water to produce rights and there is something called virtual water which means you go to where the water is and there is also something called there is a little bit more negative called water graph or land graph. What you need to think about is what is China doing in Africa? First of all they are building a lot of infrastructure but it's not rice mills but they are building roads they are doing a lot of things in Africa to help them to build infrastructure. You know, a few months ago Bob Singler was invited to Saudi Arabia and I think he thought he was going to get some money from the Saudis but the Saudis wanted advice about where to grow rice in Africa and so you have a question and you know when the Chinese grow rice in Africa they don't grow it the way the Africans do they grow it the way the Chinese do and they hire a cheap laborer and I don't know exactly what they do with the rice once they get it grown whether it goes back to China or further at least the large army of Chinese are now working in Africa I'm not sure I don't think it helps the African countries to develop their own rice because the technology they are using is not the kind of technology I think that small African farmers need to use so I think that what I'm saying is that somehow this needs to be put into the equation of where is the future for African rice I'll take few more questions I usually agree with Peter I'm less pessimistic than he is and Peter you were not here yesterday when I made a comment on the very question you brought up which is how much rice should Africa import relative to domestic production and I think it's not an either or issue we all agree with that and I just want to put some numbers on the table I happen to know these numbers because I just looked at them while I was bored on the flight right now approximately the demand for rice in Africa is close to 30 million give or take no mercy no mercy right now the total cultivated area under rice is around 5 million hectares so let's take an average of 2 tons per hectare you've got about 10 million tons that's coming out in Africa today and with a little bit of effort you can make that 3 tons right so you're going to get about half of your requirement with a little bit of effort with quite a lot of effort you can make that 4 tons and get a significant share of that requirements coming out of Africa and much of that is going to be for areas where consumption is more low etc and you still have urban populations in cities like Lagos etc where it makes sense to you I don't think there's that level of strategic discussion taking place around rice in Africa I think much of the discussion around rice in Africa is should Africa import should Africa produce its own but we're not taking we're not opening up the map of Africa and saying where can we increase productivity and what's the cost of doing that etc and I hope card can do that you know we're trying this from the Gates Foundation side but it's really important for people to take that broader perspective the second question and so that's not a question it's a comment that's not card which is the South-South cooperation which you've got is really useful I'm wondering why some very important players in South-South cooperation are not in card and should be there in your list you don't have China you don't have India you don't have several other countries who are big players in rice and these countries are doing terrible activities which is outside of card and I think at this stage getting everybody into the same hand is better than people I don't think either of them are questions