 In 1998, as I was becoming familiar with rice, it was obvious that rice is clearly a public sector activity. Now, that does not take into account clearly all of the equipment and processing that was done by the private sector. In terms of developing technologies, clearly the private sector was involved in that. But in terms of the germplasm, and primarily the agronomic research that would have been associated with germplasm, there was not a lot of private sector involvement. I'm not going to say there was none, but if you looked at where most of the technologies came from, they would have come from the public sector. My concern for rice in this area is that with the decline in funding from the public sector, if you looked at other commodities, for example, as public sector funding went down, private sector funding went up, such that if you looked at the producer, he wasn't being short changed in terms of product. In other words, when I started to school in the 60s, all of the major Midwestern universities had a corn breeding program. Now maybe two of them do. Maybe three. But yet the farmers still have a wide array of germplasm products coming out every year, new ones from the private sector. Now, are we going to have that in rice? In other words, as public sector funding goes down, is the public sector going to step forward? And that's a real issue. Now one of the things that has intrigued me about hybrids is I thought this would be a way for the private sector to get involved in rice. So there are a lot of issues surrounding hybrid rice. In other words, there are problems that you have in rice that you don't have in sorghum, maize, and other hybrid products, in terms of the heterosis, in terms of the production systems, the sterility systems and stuff, are more complicated than, for example, maize. I think it would be great if hybrids were successful, because this is clearly something that will draw in public sector, I mean private sector support. And all of a sudden you will start having products, research and products being done by the private sector on rice germplasm.