 Thank you very much. I see lots of friends in the audience. Thank you all for coming. I feel slightly awkward at this session that if you look at the program, the title of my talk is Significance of Rice Policy and Investment for Future Rice Food Security. It doesn't actually say anything about Africa. I don't actually know very much about rice in Africa. I have to correct it just a bit. I was actually influential in the book on West Africa, but it was Scott Pearson, Chuck Humphries, and Dirk Stryker, who were the actual authors of the book on the rice economy of West Africa. That book followed on a book in two journals and a whole bunch of working papers, and that Wally Falcon and I had done a political economy of rice in Asia. Really, that was the early 1970s when that work was done. Then when Food Research Institute of Stanford was still very active, and so Scott and Dirk Stryker, Chuck Humphries, took that political economy framework to West Africa. I was engaged with that, but I had left Stanford by the time I'd gone to Cornell. I didn't have my name on the book. I wish I had. That remains an influential book. If we want to understand where the rice economy of the whole continent, especially of West Africa, is coming from, what the historical roots of the rice economy, are in place to start as any. My experience, as most of you know, is primarily working on the rice economy of Asia. When we talk about rice food security, that will be heavily driven by events in Asia. I apologize for missing what I hear were some wonderful discussions yesterday afternoon in this room, but we had a whole bunch of ministerial representatives from Asia across the way with Minister Kao Da Phuc from Vietnam, sharing a roundtable discussion on the future of rice security in Asia, and in particular a discussion of a task force report that the Asia Society and Erie produced. I have one of the members of this task force right here in the room. It's a pretty distinguished group of members of that task force. Robert Sue represents the Asia Society. He's here. Robert, you do have copies that people would like to get ahold of. We talked about the recommendations that came out of this task force report, as I said, jointly done with the Asia Society, the International Rice Research Institute, a whole set of recommendations that I think would push the investment and policy environment forward in a very positive way. We focused mostly on Asia, that was a piece of reference. I would argue that the technology-high part, the non-farm economy part, the safety net part, and the provision of public goods in research and trade all are relevant in the African context as well as in the Asian context. So if your sole interest is developing the rice economy of Africa, I would still urge you to get a copy and take a look at that. My interest in the rice economy in Africa is the role it plays in the global rice economy. Africa has become a very important player because it's become quite a significant importer. Now, I hear my colleagues in Africa describe that as a failure, that something's wrong with Africa, that it has to import rice. I don't see anything wrong with that. People have a demand for rice, their incomes are rising enough that they can afford the rice, they're buying rice from the market. I hope in our push for investment in the rice economy of Africa that you do not try to do that inside a sealed wall. That would be extremely inefficient. It would be bad for global food security and if you cut yourself off from the world-rise economy it will be bad for African food security. So my presentation this morning is from the point of view of how does Africa participate in the world-rise economy as a more efficient producer? No reason in the world why Africa should not be a more efficient producer, but also as an efficient consumer of rice. So I want to talk a little bit about both. What is driving rice consumption in Africa? This, Sam, knows this is a really tough question. In the book that will be launched tomorrow celebrating Uri's 50th anniversary as a chapter on the long-run dynamics of rice consumption. By long run it would really be long run. We are doing projections out to the year 2050 trying to figure out what economic growth, structural transformation changing population growth, rural urban migration what are all these sort of long run structural factors doing to the demand for rice and we do it globally and then we try to do it by region. Well we've got a pretty good fix on these long run dynamic factors in Asia which is to say we have a pretty good fix on something between 80 and 90% of rice consumption in the world going forward. We can see pretty clearly the negative income elasticity of demand for rice in Asia playing out as income growth accelerates. We can see very dramatically the reduction in rice consumption when somebody leaves the farm and goes to the city as part of the structural transformation. We can see the slowing population growth in Asia slowing the overall demand for rice. Those forces are pretty clear and you can roll those forward with reasonable confidence. We cannot see any of those forces visibly in the African story. All we see is over the last 40 years rice consumption in Africa has been growing at 3.4% per year and there is absolutely no evidence in the time series data that that trend is beginning to slow down. There is no negative quadratic term in the time series equation. It's growing at 3.4% a year after year and if you roll that forward 40 years from now and do not do something about production the production in Africa will be importing 100 billion tons of rice. Now I don't think that can happen but I do think Africa could be consuming 50 or 60 million tons of rice even on a conservative basis and then the question comes where do they get? Are they going to grow it domestically efficiently? Are they going to buy it from the world market? If so, how is the world market going to provide volumes like that? 30 million tons tests the capacity of the world market now to get up to 50 or 60 or 70 million tons. A couple of decades from now strikes me as a serious challenge. So what I would like to do the rest of my time and I know we're saving time for questions I want to ask then what is it that Africa will be doing on the investment side in terms of production, productivity growth vis-a-vis what it's going to be doing on the trade side and participating in the world market. I've been hanging around the URI scientists for long enough to know that there are viable technologies that will fit African ecological settings that if they're not totally available right now will be in five years or ten years. There can well be an African rice revolution from the technological point of view. I think it's going to be physically and technically possible to do that and I know there aren't very many rice creators there's some problems getting that geared up but there's a lot of stillover from the kinds of varieties that get developed for the difficult environments in East and Southeast Asia and South Asia there's a lot of stillover from those varieties that might work in similar ecological settings in Africa so I'm pretty optimistic that we're going to find rice varieties that work reasonably well in the African context. What I am not so confident about are investments in the other critical areas beyond technology that will be absolutely essential and will be bundling constraints on whether that technological potential actually gets turned into production. We already heard the lack of infrastructure the fact that there are many productive areas of Africa that are more or less cut off physically from the market and if they're cut off physically then they're cut off from the flow of goods they're cut off from the price formation they're cut off from the market services and the whole supply chain both inputs and outputs infrastructure that's I think roads first and foremost but it's irrigation if you're going to use really high, high-end, high-yield rice varieties you're going to need some kind of water control but increasingly if you're going to have reasonably high quality rice you're going to need a million sector a modern, relatively sophisticated milling sector if you want to compete with the quality of rice that's coming in from outside and so the infrastructure investment all the way from the ports and the roads the communication systems maybe some water control along the way but very much including the quality dimensions in the marketing system and in the milling capacity mills are expensive if you're going to put in a big mill for each capacity and drying and have the quality dimensions and how those are going to get financed and where they're going to get located I think is a huge unknown in the African context and there's a real catch 22 it's awfully hard to get the private sector and farmers to invest in growing a lot more high-quality paddy if there's no place for it to go but why would a miller invest in a new mill if there isn't any paddy around and so somehow we have to grow these two things together there's enough of a national planner in me to say, gee, maybe the government could actually help solve the coordination problems that are involved here but there's also enough of a skeptic in me to know that governments don't actually do that very well and so I think we have to put on the agenda how you're going to solve that coordination problem between expanding production and expanding the milling and marketing capacity so that they actually mesh reasonably well as we go forward even if we can solve that I think we then have the most difficult problem and that's the policy environment Prabhu stressed yesterday in the open session the difficulty in putting in place and the term he used was sustaining a favorable policy environment for the rice economy that was specifically not how to make sure farmers have a profitable rice sector that's part of it but policy actually has to cut inputs to farmers to the marketing chain to consumers to trade and that has to include the reality that that trade system is out there and important and it is the key indicator of whether you're efficient or not if you're competitive against reasonably high quality inputs imports you've got a competitive rice economy and if you've got to put up 30, 40, 50% barriers to keep cheap rice out to compete against that then you've got a problem you are going to be a high cost producer and that's going to have real consequences then for the welfare of your consumers