 The Institute signed a five-year memorandum of understanding to increase our collaborative efforts for the sustainable intensification and management of rice-fishing production systems. For the benefit of our online audiences, we have set up this night discussion for us to share more about this collaboration and how it satisfies our goals for improving nutrition and water-secure future. Joining me today are E.W.s Director-General Matthew Morrell, Gareth Johnstone, Director-General for Rural Fish, and Mark Smith, E.W. Director-General for Research and Development. Good morning, gentlemen. Good morning. Good morning. So, just to start today's discussion, we have some questions that we feel with our social media channels, and each of you can go around answering it. What are we, you mean, Rural Fish and E, trying to collectively address through this interview? Okay, so, alright, I'll have the first go. Look, we understand that the problems of meeting development goals and also addressing future sustainability needs come very much not through single technologies, but through the intersection around systems. So, in Southeast Asia and South Asia, in particular, rice, water, and fish come together as an integral part of farmers' livelihoods, but also of managing the environmental impacts. So, what we're looking for here is the way in which the science and the technologies that we do separately can come together collectively to answer higher level questions around the future of the system and how we can deliver even more benefit in the future. I would just add, there's many synergies within the rice field, rice fishery system, synergies in terms of nutrition and nitrogen in the soil, the pests of control, and so the synergies reflected in the field itself and in the rice fishery system can also be reflected within our respective centres, knowing more about the systems, understanding how they operate, applying the systems approach, so looking at how foods can be produced sustainably from landscapes that take on and you convert to these approaches. There's a lot of new technology, it's been around for thousands of years, but the collaboration that we seek is to learn more how it can work in a modern system, in a modern world. I think we're in a time where societies and the planet faces extraordinary challenges around meeting goals for food and nutrition security, meeting goals for water security, for reducing the environmental footprint of agriculture, for making sure that we're resilient to climate change. So in that sense, I think it's really incumbent on organisations like ours with the complementarities that we have between rice and fish and water resources to come together and use our combined capabilities and our combined networks and our combined partnerships to deliver those systems level solutions. Thank you. So a lot of you have already addressed the second question, but if there's anything to add, how does this agreement benefit, satisfy each of our organisations or stakeholders and our goals? Maybe I can start. I think that the CGIR and our centres, what are we here for? We're here to deliver science and then impacts from science at scale that change and that change the systems that we were just talking about. And so speaking from the point of view of IMI, where our focus is water resources, if we're going to have that kind of systems level impacts at large scale with the speed required to address the challenges that the world is facing right now, then we will benefit as a centre, as an institute from leveraging the skills and networks that our partners bring into this agreement. Yeah, to say that this is not something that's just come about today. We've been working together for several years and in fact in places like Myanmar, Cambodia, Bangladesh, our organisation's been working together informally as well as in projects. And in Myanmar, for example, where there is a growing interest and need for integrated farming systems combining the importance of protein, carbohydrates, utilising the resources more effectively. This has been a really interesting way of which we're collaborating and that sort of formulated over the number of years into this partnership. So I'm really pleased that we managed to take that step today to formalise that because it really helps focus on specific outcomes, using science for evidence for policy development and really helping national governments as well as I hope globally how these systems can be incorporated into the normal production systems within different countries, not just in Asia but also in other regions of the world. So I would start from the perspective of our clients, our beneficiaries, they're not looking for us to come along with one piece of the answer. They want the answer. They want the total answer. And by combining the skills here of these three centres we think that we can address in a much more comprehensive way challenges that our partners have around meeting those global food security environmental footprint questions. To come to Erie, you know, our strategy is all about transforming lives and delivering benefits for the planet through rice-based agri-food systems. There's no systems without fish or water, so we need to come together across those three elements as an integral part of where we see that we can add our particular scientific expertise. But we don't have hydrologists, we don't have fish, geneticists. So it's crazy to develop that. We should always work to augment what we do through these partnerships. Finally at the risk of stating the obvious, do you think it is high time for CG centres to lose research collaboration efforts while in the household? Thank you. I think there is a lot of collaboration anyway. There's a lot of work that's going on between different centres. And it's sort of also determined regionally, geographically, where there's a need. I mean, there's no understanding here. Sri Lanka is where the headquarters of Imi is. We're here in Philippines with Erie and we're based in Malaysia. The megadeltas of Asia, these are the areas where rice and fish combine. Beneficiaries, clients will require solutions to these and so the CG's come together with other partners. It's not just the centres, it's with other partners with businesses, with government, with NGOs to actually solve some of these collective solutions. And finding also ways to scale out in a much more sort of effective and efficient way. But certainly doing the science, connecting it with the policy and connecting it with the private sector. And this is where our skills come. And other centres are doing this. It's just that we felt that this was the right moment to come together and say, okay, let's sign an agreement that really commits us and also demonstrates and promotes these systems as well as promoting the importance of collaboration within the CG system and centre to centre collaborations. Well, just to comment that the problems that face us, as we mentioned earlier, in relation to climate change and in relation to future sustainability of production and so on, are much bigger than any one organisation, any one country. So we need to pull our resources and work to understand, for example, the trade-offs between various technologies. So there might be something that we want to do in rice that the fish guys say, no, that might negatively impact our fish farms or it may not be the best answer from a hydrological point of view. So we need to bring our thinking together so that we can come up with, not just the first best solution, which might be what we think, but the ultimate best solution. And to do that, we need to bring our collective talents together. Yeah, I think we shouldn't underestimate what you're pointing out, that there's a lot of collaboration that occurs already between each of our institutes. And so part of the opportunity here is to make sure that happens consistently, but also programmatically so that we can take on the challenges of understanding and addressing trade-offs and helping, as you say, our clients, our partners to navigate those trade-offs in these systems, which is fundamental to solutions and to really delivering the kind of change that we're looking toward. Thank you, Matthew, Gary, and Mark for sharing Yuri, Brodefish, and Eni's perspectives on a truly timely and important topic in partnership. Thank you. Thank you.