 Our section is part of the grain nutrition and post-harvest centre at Erie and our goal is to contribute to poverty reduction and we do that by having two objectives. One is to reduce post-harvest losses which basically then will generate more incomes and the other one is to generate more incomes for farmers by adding value and that can be done in two ways by producing better quality or by enabling for example farmers to store their petty instead of selling straight after harvest so that they can get a better price in the off-season when the prices have increased because typically the prices are very low at harvest time when there's a big supply of petty. We are working basically we are applying a value chain approach that starts with harvesting up to the market and along the post-harvest value chain there are different technologies so so our activities are mainly in helping people to mechanize post-harvest or improve the existing post-harvest system so that includes for example mechanical harvesters like small-scale combines it includes rice dryers for used by contractors or by the commercial sector the contractors typically provide the service drying service to farmers and it also includes improved storage systems so so at Erie we have piloted and and verified and and developed what we call hermetic storage. In 2008 we have completed two post-harvest projects one was funded by ADB it had the objective to improve poor farmers livelihoods by applying improved post-harvest technologies and that project was active in Cambodia and Vietnam and we were we were working in both countries with farmers in villages including the whole village it was four villages in Vietnam eight villages in Cambodia and the objective was really to demonstrate that farmers actually can get better incomes if they have a value chain approach and and apply post-harvest technologies according to their needs and also improve post- harvest management options and the second project was from the irrigated rice research consortium we have a post-harvest workgroup in that consortium and the activities were very similar but they were expanding the range to Cambodia from Cambodia and Vietnam to Laos Myanmar and Indonesia also and the outcome of the project is very encouraging we've basically shown that farmers do benefit from the improved technologies and especially the market information for example was very much appreciated by the farmers hermetic storage enables them to to store their their seeds a lot longer safer and then thus reduce the seed rate which saves their money they can sell additional grain in the market the dryers introducing the dryers is a little bit difficult because you have to start local production first and so it takes some time but we have now for example this in two years by the end of 2008 we have 48 dryers installed in Myanmar all basically paid by the users we have nine dryers in Cambodia and around 24 dryers in Laos and all those countries basically starting from zero zero dryers being used for farmers the significance of the post-harvest work is really trying to save what has been produced and save the the production increases that research is getting us and trying to minimize post-harvest losses