 Good afternoon everybody. My name is Brian Perry. I used to be a duery up until about five years ago. When you came in, I think I was off quoted as saying you were a breath of fresh air to me. You were greeted with scattered clusters of successful research, very dispersed, and a negative corporate identity. And you have somehow brought cohesion and turned this round, a mission under the umbrella of pro-bore contributions of livestock. This is called the serate legacy. In one sentence, what do you think the serate legacy is? One sentence. I'm quick. You start to think on your feet. Well, you know I'm very tall, so you take some time. Well, I think certainly the issue of how you use livestock to address the world's problems, we go beyond the livestock sector as what he was saying earlier. I think seeing livestock not just in home value, but as a tool for development. I think that's what I would hope to be ingrained in the culture. But in that, does that match with under your tenure you've been seen as the guardian angel of the struggling smallholder farmer? But as we heard in Mario's talk, ilries emphasise the importance of value change, which by its implication means focus on other players, for whom livestock play a role. And in processes of development, in many developed countries, the smallholders become a dodo. So should ilry not be more involved in poverty reduction through livestock, which brings in different scales of livestock production? Well, obviously this is a very central question. And I think we probably have treated smallholders as a homogeneous crowd. And many of the discussions have sort of treated them as sort of one solution. I think more and more we realise that there is, smallholders can tap into value chains and markets. And I think if you look at the dairy development, it shows that it can be done. And it's done with millions and millions of smallholders. We also see smallholders in many other value chains successfully operating. You think about coffee tea, many other commodities. So smallholders can't do that if the environment is appropriate. And I think in many countries, this has not been the case. And that's a bias against smallholders and it promotes large-scale production in many cases. Because of policy environment, the state has failed to provide the basic services. So large-scale people can't do that internally in the company, while smallholders can't. So I don't think there is a role. But I'm talking about this mixture. I mean in Ethiopia, for example, of looking at various scales of operation and how they link, and the roles of livestock, because of the smaller scale being able to feed off some of the resources and services of larger scale. But should that not be more of a, should we not be more broader looking in the roles of livestock and property reduction? Well, for sure we should be broader looking that understanding in many cases, smallholders will transit out of agriculture, but it's going to take many, many years in many locations. So even if we believe that in the long run they won't be there, there is a social problem there. And the instruments, the smartest instruments to help them may be deficit payments, maybe cash transfers, or they may be in some cases developing a market for a commodity they can produce. I think we need to be much more open in understanding that it's not just technological interventions, it's all sorts of policy institutional interventions which can make it happen. And it's the mix which will be very variable across locations, I guess. Your strengths were arguably in developing a systematic approach for ill-re, but some might say your weaknesses were that few people outside ill-re understood. Is that fair? Yes, yes. Because here you have, and also with relating to your partners, you've been developing, wanting to have impact. And I noticed that Tom Randolph was very impertinent on his video saying that for the first time ill-re through the new CRPs is going to have impact. But it's not the problem that many of your development partners through whom that impact will have, don't understand some of the complexities of the way that ill-re was structured and these different programs. Do you think that was, is that a challenge in making, having impact happen? In other words, your ideas, but people have to pass those through very traditional disciplinary departments and environs. Yeah, I would certainly agree that that is a big challenge. I think the art is to derive the agenda and be ahead of the impact, but not too far ahead so that people get disconnected from what you're doing. And I think we have had that challenge, how you bring along a lot of other partners in understanding that the solutions are not just a new grass or a new breed, but that the solutions imply many cases, institutions. And I think the interesting thing is, if you think about small older data development, which is I think our most successful intervention, we started with a technological approach, we realized it didn't work, we had to move much more towards marketing institutions. And then now, for example, in the EADD program, we see that when you start sorting out those constraints, then there is a real demand for technology and people do need that, but it's in a different context. They move, you overcome a certain number of barriers, and then technology definitely plays a key role. Now, the reality is that there is an enormous number of other players providing that technology at that stage, and we see a lot more interaction with the private sector and others, and thinking through what we do in that context, I think, is a challenge. You've always let and emphasized integration of disciplines and approaches, but a couple of little examples of this, one of this in partnership with FAO. Now, I would sort of, the great international facilitator of delivery of the livestock technologies and the knowledge, but that relationship is embarrassingly weak, almost non-functional in some areas. What is it? What would you say to that? Well, that's a very small deal. He got me up to ask you the question. No, he didn't. He has mentioned, I think, that we as researchers are not the ones developing the normative approaches and trying to distribute them. We, I always say, our challenge is to question FAO. Is this the best way to do this type of solution or address small numbers and so on? And so, by definition, by being a researcher in a nation, we're asking questions, we're challenging the state of school. This is the nature of science, and therefore we will not always be 100% in agreement, but I think that challenge, for example, in terms of Long Shadow, we've had lots of discussions and I think I would play that some thinking in FAO has evolved to look at it in a more comprehensive way than sort of the initial documents were. Okay, let's just take the Long Shadow. That's a good idea. How much damage to Hillary did the Long Shadow report to? Were you caught by surprise? No, I don't think we were caught by surprise. I think we knew what that team was doing and we have discussed it many times. I think the fundamental difference was that our mandate as CJRT is to address poverty, and FAO's mandate is a much broader one of global food supply, of governance of the international food system, etc. My question is, what was the communication? Because after it came out, Hillary then did an awful lot of work to try and say, well, no, of course it's not quite right if we're looking at poverty and so on. So was there not adequate communication on understanding of what they were going to say? Could there have been a more harmonious report that came out if Hillary had been more engaged? Because it did damage Hillary, didn't it? I don't know if it damaged Hillary. I think it raised the relevance of the facts a lot. And in a way, it would be awesome to think a lot more on that. If you look at our 2002 strategy which you were very much involved in developing, we didn't say very much about the facts in those days. So in other days, when you do look at the facts a lot more and a lot shall be up to the student. That was a long time ago. That was when you first started. Okay, now you placed the science leadership, this was an issue in your early tenure, in the hands of the program directors, and you called them directors instead of scientists, who then were then hands-off. In retrospect, was that correct? Because the issue is still on the table. I understand. Well, I'm not sure this is afternoon. Well, the issue is on the table or not. But let me tell you the thinking, how we decided, it was a very controversial discussion. Are these people program leaders or directors? We argued at the time the partnerships were going to be critical. We needed to engage the development partners. The fact that there was a director coming to talk to World Food Program or FAO or Heifer International, that it opened a lot of doors in the partnerships if people had director on the business card. And so really, I think it was much more a marketing tool than necessarily that the job of a director is significantly different from the job of a leader. We expected them to lead the science. What I did always argue was that we were expecting people to be in those positions, who would have done their academic research and would have their spurs hurry, would not be trying to publish and compete with their own scientists, but who would mentor other scientists. And I think that still is the right decision. We clearly felt that you needed a lot of effort to manage scientists in this new way. You couldn't do that and at the same time have your own pet area where you're doing your own research. So I stand to that. I think if it was wrong, but I certainly believe that that was a way to manage in a very complex time where people needed to take a lot of other jobs. If they had a particular pet area, they would sort of bias the allocation of resources across the areas. Okay, so you've got that one right, you say. So looking back over this period, is there one thing that you could pick out that you say, my goodness, I really got that wrong? I lost. I'm not sure I want to share with you. Okay, just pick out one that you really feel that you would like to share. Well, I think if you ask me, internal communications. I think we should have invested a lot more in internal communications. I think we wanted to have quite a dramatic change and we were so busy with a number of the partnership and other issues around that that the effort was very much towards the outside into raising resources, et cetera. And in a way, we may have lost the troops at times by not communicating enough. I should say probably the mistake was to think that ICTs and intranet, et cetera, were going to do the trick and probably would have taken a lot more face to face. But there were competition for time. That's why we didn't do it. But I do feel that that is something, if I had a chance, I would have done differently.