 The subtitle of my paper is the trouble with you economists, okay, and you know sometime Last February in February in 2008 when the rice prices are really up and high I was in Bob Ziegler's office and Bob said he's the current DG of your he's the current DG and Bob Ziegler said He started off the conversation. He said the trouble with you economists and I thought to myself How many times have I heard that? Nobody ever says the trouble with you plant pathologists or the trouble with you plant breeders There's always the trouble with you economists. So he said the trouble with you economists is you're always thinking about the past you're never thinking about the future and I Said Bob you should be lucky because When we think about the future we project the future we're always wrong, you know And so about that time there's a guy called nip on who came from TDI to give a compass to the rice prices are way up here Nip on said One of his presentations he said, you know Everybody thinks the rice price is going to stay high The World Bank thinks so and they're always wrong and so and so things don't so like that like that and he said predicting the rice price is like fortune-telling and He said this might happen that might happen something like that And finally he said at the bottom only God knows So I think we should quit well. No, I don't want to quit yet because I want to I want to add something pursue the idea Ziggler's problem, you know the trouble you economists. Yeah, okay, so you're always looking the best Well, you know in fact when prices were high in September October November December of 2008 What did the economists say? Well, Randy Barker gave a seminar at Erie. Well private was March or something April April so Prices were sky-high and what Randy Barker said in April was These high prices are not going to last they're going to come down just like nip on I gave a seminar and I said these high prices of rice are not going to last they're gonna come down But Bob Ziggler didn't want to hear that He wanted prices to stay high Because if prices are high it justifies more money for Erie. He's got more money anyway, so So, you know if you focus on the past you're wrong if you focus on the future you're wrong Yeah, you know, so Yeah well Yeah, you know I had a chart where I projected the Erie budget, you know, yeah And that's the only projection I had the budget was had been going down down like this So I projected it going like that. That's what happened. And that was nice too. That was happening Bob Ziggler was happy Well, I think you know the challenge is that the time lag between increasing the budget for a research Institute And any impact on productivity in farmers fields is about a 15-year lag This is the problem with games or any of these don't match. They want they want they want a three-year And they won't not a 15-year impact and one of the problems I have Mention that is about you have impact assessors now at every one of these centers, right? And they're trying to assess the impact almost year-to-year about what has Erie accomplished this year or so forth like that and You know Rome you said Rome wasn't built in the day I mean, you know people like the Gates Foundation they need to understand what agricultural research and stuff is about you know because it is a 15-year horizon of this stuff and That's one of the one of the major problems. Well, I think that you're right the emphasis on impact is misplaced We need an emphasis on Monitoring and evaluation that is monitoring what's going on exactly so we can understand the process and we believe This process will lead to technological change and will lead to impact that is beneficial to farmers That's the question. Yeah, so are we making progress toward the goal and in order to understand? Even now what the impact is you you have to have data and survey work to find out again going back Which farmers are adopting which aren't adopting why what's happening on the ground? There's a big project now the Gates is going to fund in Africa to do just that I mean We don't know much about the new races We need to we need to understand in that work that what we observe on the ground today is a result of Research that has done 10 15 years ago So the new races in Africa are the result of work that Monty Jones did at water 15 years ago. Yeah Has nothing to do with what Gates is funding today. Yeah, and that's the process we have to understand That's the process the president Obama has to understand when he says we're going to start funding More work on agriculture in Africa Yeah, that that impact will happen in the future and in the distant future not in the near future