 It was going to be famine in Asia within the next 20 to 30 years unless we had some drastic changes in methods of producing rice. Three years after we made that initial cross we had one of you called IR8-288-3 which later became IR8. IR8 represents a disruptive technology that's never seen before in the rice sector. It was based upon a single gene and that single gene changed the plant to architecture. Well, now what are you going to breed for? What are the objectives here? Channel says, how do you get high yield? Okay, how do you get high yield? So it was blind crossing. Some tall things which are horrible and lodging and these short kind of miserable disease susceptible but short. Something has happened. There were big plants and there were short plants and there were no intermediate plants. There were huge but there were short plants. And the short ones, leaves like this, erect, darker green, sturdy stems, high tillering. In late 1966, Hank Beechel's dream was about to come true. He and his colleagues had selected a semi-dwarf progeny from IR8 cross of the dwarf plant from China with the tall rice from Indonesia. Its strong stems held the plant proudly upright even when heavily fertilized. We were able to get up to 10 metric tons per hectare when the average yield in the Philippines was 1.2 metric tons at the time we went in there. That started the revolution in rice. 18 months after we introduced IR8 in the Philippines from 1964-65. I'm glad to know that the institute is prepared to make these seeds available to all nations, to all nations. Fifty percent of the people there in Luzon with irrigation were growing as the shocks did drop right. They say today, eerie people say, that there are 700 million people who are being fed today that could not have been fed had this new kind of rice responded to fertilizer. It's highly unlikely that we'll see another step change in yield in a single variety as we've seen with IR8. The challenges now are more complex. While we still have to meet the needs of an ever-increasing population, we must also meet the challenges of climate change, the need to improve farmers' livelihoods, the needs of urban consumers and the need to overcome the nutritional challenges still facing far too many people. This is the big challenge of the future. There's never been a more important time to commit to the high technology future of agriculture. Come and join us.