 We have all the data that are demonstrating that through plant biotechnology, we are able to address all those type of issues, heat, cold, flooding, shorted, water, sun and soil, and overall increasing heat. In this table, I've tried to summarize the different challenges and the different potential solutions that could be addressed. The idea there is to show you that no matter what are the challenges, there are plenty of solutions that are available, and plenty of solutions tapping into plenty of different technologies. So if we are talking about the overall reduction in yield, and here I'm really talking about rise, the first way for us to address the need to increase yield in rise is for us, by a proper science, to develop new hybrid rise varieties. This is typically a non-GM solution in order to be able to address this type of issue. But we are also working on GM solution in order to improve for sort of incentive performance of the plant. These are elements that are into the climate that our research is working on. This is infection. We are addressing bacterial leaf-like resistance through our breeding program. We are also working on the field diagnostic kit in order to make sure that farmers will be able to early detect the presence of fungus and will be able to make the appropriate treatment. We are also finding chemical solutions that are stimulating the plant's defense mechanisms. And so on and so forth. For insect infestation, we are working on varieties that are going to withstand the Grand Plant Hopper, and also we are developing BT variety solutions. For weed control, herbicide tolerance, for salinity, salinity tolerance, for water shortage, not only we are working on short-duration hybrid varieties in order to contribute less water, but we are also trying to develop a new agronomic system or to further promote your agronomic system like direct CD-brides. Label shortage is also addressed through the system. Flooding through the launch of varieties that can withstand the submergent tolerance and quality and taste through variety selection. So out of this table, what you see is that there are really a lot of technical solutions that are available. And my belief is that technology is not the leading factor. There is already, through the pipelines that are developed by the industry, but also by the private sector, there are already most of the solutions in order to address the most of the issues that we are facing today. The thing is, technology is not everything. We need to make sure that we are into an environment that will accept technology, that will help the development of this technology. And this, I have always seen only some of the points that we needed to work on, making sure that we are keeping on a farmer and training communication, making sure that we make that farmer have access to micro capabilities, making sure that they have access to market, facilitating trade between the different countries and the different regions, making sure that there is the logistic in order to be able to restore the grain after it has been harvested in order to minimize loss, making sure that we are into an environment that is accepting technology. And finally, ensuring that agriculture is going to be on top of the agenda of the politics, so that decisions are being made, budgets are being found, and that in the end we are going to decrease the level of the language people apply. I'd like to finish my presentation with this cartoon, and this is something that somehow is, I think, summarizing very, very well what we need to do, what we have ahead. This is this train planning, the growth chart of the population, and saying, I think I can, I think I can, I hope I can, I really hope I can, and man, I really hope I can. Because there is a sense of urgency here. We are talking about 9 billion people in 2015, but in order to prepare for those 9 billion people in 2015, we need to act now today. Thank you very much. Thank you, Mattias. And let's move on to our next presentation by Dr. Thomas Leerden. Dr. Thomas Leerden is a professor in the Department of Agriculture, Food, and Resource Economics at Michigan State University. Right to joining MSU, he worked with IFLI for 8 years. Tom's research focuses on links between agri-food industry transformations and food security in Asia, and he's listed in whose who in economics was invited to World Economic Forum in 2009, and he's also a member of the WEF's Global Alliance Council for Food Security. He's going to talk about the other end of the supply chain, talk more about the ice in the air supermarket. With that, Tom. Thank you so much. It's a pleasure to be here with you, and my focus is not going to be on the farm level, except in a way that in a sense the farm level is affected by the other levels in the supply chain. And I think it's important to emphasize, and as I'm going to be speaking about the rice industry and the rice market, that 50 to 75% of the rice price that's paid by the consumer in Asia is formed by the segments of the supply chain that come after the farm. Distribution in logistics, processing, retail, these are basically the segments that form 50 to 75% of the rice price, and yet the discussion already at this conference might have touched on those segments 5% of the time or 1% of the time. So I think that that investment of those and understanding of those has to become central to understanding the overall rice economy. Now, to summarize that idea, the talk is called Rice in the Air of the Supermarket, and I'll focus on Asia and I'll use some field research that's been funded by the Asian Development Bank, mainly, in order to illustrate this, and of course the points will be general because I don't have time to go into great detail, but of course I'm talking about areas that are heterogeneous and so there's lots of differences across the area. So I'll talk about tendencies and future movements and moving averages. And I'll start with a set of points about structural change in the rice industry, then I'll look at conduct change in the rice industry and finally performance change in the rice industry. And my first set of points will deal with trends that have been occurring in the 1990s and 2000s in the industry, let's say especially in Asia where I'll focus, and you can think of these as symbiotic trends, that is they're co-evolving, they're very related. The first one, one I'm very passionate about, is the consolidation and multinationalization in retail simply put the rapid rise of supermarkets and what we've been finding is that supermarkets that might have been a very small share of the food industry or food economy in 1990 even in Asia have gone to be 30, 50 more percent of the food economy by the end of the 2010 and an example from our recent work is that while there were no supermarkets at the end of the year in 1989 in China by the study that we did this year we found that 50 percent of rice, retail, and Beijing is going through supermarkets. Now this is about the early 1990s, late 1980s in Hong Kong so it's lagging behind that but it's already changed very quickly. It's lagging behind overall penetration of supermarkets and processed food which is around 75 percent of the largest cities in China but it's catching up. Now in Delhi where we just did a study and 85 percent of the supermarket sales in Delhi have been formed in the past three years so this is very recent already supermarkets have 7 percent of the rice, retail, and Delhi. The concomitant point of course is that there's been as in many parts of the world the trend that you see also in Northeast Asia and East Asia is now occurring in Southeast Asia and starting in South Asia and certainly in China which is the decline of the traditional rice shops so there's a fundamental shading up of the retail side of the rice economy. Then there's also a shake up that's occurring really over the past decade or a little bit more depending on the country in the milling sector with rapid consolidation and mechanization a rise of large and medium mills and we've watched it in our studies a rapid decline of the small rural rice mills and a rise, this has been fascinating in our study in Beijing with Haimung Jalan province that there's a rise of direct relationships between the mill and the wholesaler and the mill and the supermarket cutting out the rural broker, the semi wholesaler all these pieces in the chain that we've come to think of are there Third point of structural change is related to the point I just made which is the rapid consolidation in disintroduction and rice wholesaler there's a rise of medium and large wholesalers that we've found are representing directly sets of mills or single mills and a decline of the small rural rice brokers in many areas The last structural point is that just as downstream from the farmer one seen rapid ferment and change in Asia also upstream as is evidenced by the presence of buyer and other aggregate food companies at this conference there's been a growth, consolidation, multinationalization in the inputs being sold to farmers a rise of large seed chemical companies the start of the rise of one stop shop rural modern input retail if you want input supermarkets that one is seeing in India and the rural business hubs the decline of the state sector that was so important in input retail in decades past in China and India and elsewhere so in four ways structural change has been occurring very quickly in what was thought to be a sleepy sector now all of that is inducing waves of change of the conduct of the behavior in supply chains of rice first one that you can see is coming really immediately from these trends is disintermediation so when I started to do this research with colleagues everyone says well the way the rice supply chain looks in Asia is there's a farmer and then there's a rural broker and then it goes to a mill and then it goes to a broker between the mill and the city then it goes to a wholesaler within the city then it goes to a semi wholesaler and then it goes to the traditional retailer many hands lots of inefficiency but in fact what we've seen is that in very many places there's a shift from these long supply chains to much shorter chains with disintermediation and along with that shift has come a shift from the informal sector to formalization for example in the Beijing study in other places we've seen a shift from rice sold loose to rice now sold packaged labeled branded 80% of the wholesale market rice in Beijing is sold packaged labeled and branded 80% that was much much lower just five years ago and with that comes incipient traceability the importance of which I'll point out in a second a third topic in change of conduct in supply chains which sends me into you know paroxysms of obsession really is this issue of the product cycle of the value ladder climbing that one can see happening in the rice sector as well as the non-rice sector in Asia shifting from local niches building them up into commodity rice that are sold at zone level national level and international levels into commodity cost-competed products and then with differentiation of these commodity rice into quality differentiated rice that is by far the wave of the future and differentiation into safe rice green food for example in the rice sector in Beijing is rising very quickly, organic rice is and what we think when I say we I've been talking a lot and working a lot on this with Peter Timmer in fact this is an outline of our joint paper that we're preparing Thursday but this is there's a probable trend toward traceability and all of these things will conspire to make that happen and we think that traceability will be a key thing in the rice sector for the same reason that it became so in the beef, milk and produce sector because all the points that have been made about the incursion of cities into the rice areas means also incursion of pollution of metals there's going to be the same kind of PCB crisis that affected the fuel sector in Europe you'll have several major crises like that in Asia in the next five years I'm sorry to say I really believe that will happen and the traceability topic will become very central in rice