 Senior advisor at CSIS here, and I'd like to welcome you all for this morning's session on global food security and trade. I'm delighted to see so many people this morning, some familiar faces, some new faces, but on this cold morning. When I was talking to Dean Bohr, she's from Ithaca, New York, and she said Dr. Siddiqui is colder here than in upstate New York. You can believe that. That tells you how cold it is this morning. But anyway, I'm delighted to see so many faces here this morning. We'll start the program. I want to first acknowledge this program is in partnership with the Global Harvest Initiative and CSIS. We have put together a very informative session for you this morning. Allow me to give a brief plug for Global Harvest Initiative. It's a policy voice that advances research and engages with policy makers in finding solutions to feed the world. In my experience with them, I have spoken to their group about a year ago. I think it was my first, we're both Darcy, Mr. Wetter and I spoke. GHI has done a great job in terms of focusing on the global food security issues, especially their annual reports and global productivity reports. I think they are sought after and people around the world look at the information. It's very well put together, especially the report which will be subject of discussion later on. You'll find that thing very informative and very nicely professionally done. Since the food riots in more than 30 countries in 2007 and 2008, food security has been front and center in discussions at various international meetings of world leaders. And while this is recognized that we have made tremendous advances in the last 50 years in improving agriculture productivity both in developed countries and developing countries, we still are lagging behind in terms of meeting the nutritional and food needs of people around the world, especially in Asia and Africa in the coming decades. So this challenge we face, the greatest challenge in my view, we face is how do you sustainably produce sufficient nutritious and affordable food to feed 9.6 billion people which are estimated and expected to be by the middle of the century. This morning first we'll hear a keynote address for Dr. Margaret Ziegler, Executive Director of the Global Harvest Initiative. She has worked for over 20 years at the intersection of policy, agriculture, nutrition, and science. Prior to joining GHI, Dr. Ziegler served as Deputy Director for the Congressional Hunger Center, which is a bipartisan nonprofit organization based in Washington, D.C. Dr. Ziegler is a thought leader in international food security area. She has worked on issues which relate to with expertise on poverty elevation, food security, as well as development and program management. Dr. Ziegler received her B.S. degree from Miami University, Oxford, Ohio, and her master's and Ph.D. degrees in geography from the University of Cincinnati, Ohio. Dr. Ziegler's address will focus on global revolutions in agriculture, including sharing with us highlights of the findings of the 2014 Global Agricultural Productivity Report. So please join me in welcoming Dr. Ziegler. Thank you so much, Ambassador Siddiqui, and thank you to the CSIS for hosting us today. I'm glad you all came out today on a very cold morning. But I look forward to kind of laying out a framework for you, some thoughts, some ideas, some notions, and then afterwards we will plan on having a nice discussion with our panel, our distinguished panel that we have today with us, who Ambassador Siddiqui will introduce after my opening remarks. So while we're gathered here today to focus on agricultural productivity, food security, and trade, we are also keeping in the back of our minds the importance of these topics with respect to security, both national and global security issues. As the Ambassador mentioned in 2007 and 2008, the world was confronted and in the grip of a food price crisis, where we really reversed gains that had been made in prior decades, close to a billion people were thrown back into poverty. This food price crisis contributed to global instability and even in some cases the collapse of countries. So while this is an issue that sometimes is not as apparent to us here in the United States, there is a direct connection between food and nutrition security and national and global general security that we have to consider. Prices have stabilized since that time, but we are now facing an even more daunting task. We are seeing the demand rising for food, feed, fiber, and fuel, not just food, but all of the other components of agriculture that are so critical to the future needs of our growing middle class and growing global population. Each year the Global Harvest Initiative focuses on addressing this issue. What will we do in 2050? How will we meet the challenges and the demands of providing enough food, feed, fiber, and fuel? This is a subject each year of our Global Agricultural Productivity Report. We release this in Des Moines each year at the World Food Prize. And you have copies, hopefully, on your seats with PDF files and infographics and hard copies when you entered the building. So we hope that you will dig into this report. We're going to do a little bit dig into it today. And that you will find it as a source of information and you can use it in your own work. This report this year really shines a spotlight on not just a single solution or a single answer to this question. It focuses on global revolutions and the large number of revolutions that really need to take place. It also shines a special spotlight on the case of India. Some 50 years after the Green Revolution began, India has made enormous and really quite astounding progress in meeting its domestic food and nutrition needs. Our report traces the trajectory of this success in India. And it also looks at some of the coming future challenges that are faced, not only in India but also in many parts of the world. Just a brief word about the Global Harvest Initiative. We are a private sector collaboration between Accenture, Dupont, Elanco, John Deere and Monsanto. And we are joined by Consolidative Partner Institutions. These include organizations that focus on nutrition such as Gain and ACDI VOCA, which focuses on the needs of smallholder farmers all around the world. We also partner with conservation groups such as the World Wildlife Fund, the Nature Conservancy and Conservation International, among others. Our report focuses a lot on what is going to be that future demand that's coming and how can we meet it. Now we know that the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations has said that by 2050 we need at least a 60% increase in staple crops. That's a projection that FAO has made. But GHI estimates that we must actually double agricultural output because we have to include feed, fiber and fuel. Why do we need to double it? Well, we can see that this global agricultural imperative is coming from rising demand in so many different sources. First of all, the just sheer population growth. We're expected to grow from a little over $7 billion, now up to $9.6 billion by 2050. The urbanization rates are growing, which also is going to create a lot more demand for products from agriculture. Currently at 54%, it's expected to rise by 2050 to 66% of the global population. And possibly the most important and the most dramatic change, which many of you are aware of, but it's really quite a dramatic change, is that the middle class is growing from about 50% of the global population, where we are today, to 70% by 2050. This means extremely dramatic changes in diets. And our GAP report really digs into a lot more of the details about this. Overall, we're going to expect to see a huge amount of demand for protein. And this is seen in the rise of poultry and eggs. 63% increase is expected. In dairy, about a 55% increase. And in ruminant meat and livestock, about 44% increase, along with aquaculture increasing at least 9% and probably more by 2050. So this is going to create a lot of stress on the natural resource base. We know that about 70% of the world's extracted freshwater right now is used for agriculture, primarily for irrigation. That is going to be expected to rise to about 89% by 2050. We are currently using about one-third of the world's land resource base for agriculture production right now. And we know that about a third of agricultural output is either lost or wasted after harvest. At the same time that we're experiencing this changing diet and the growth in population, we are going to see also challenges to agriculture from climate change and climate risks. And unfortunately, these volatile patterns are going to impact regions of the world that are already vulnerable to stress, particularly sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. These are two regions where smallholder farmers are very predominant and where they're going to need considerable support in the coming decades. And we can't focus just on agricultural production alone. We have to think about the nutrition imperative that we're facing today. We already know that about 135 million children right now around the world are stunted. This basically means a condition where you have irreversible damage to both cognitive and physical ability. And we can't produce food only. We have to think about the nutritional mix of those foods and ensuring that those food choices, better food choices, reach a wider and wider population. Excessive weight is also going to become a global health challenge in the coming decades. Solutions for all of these malnutrition and hunger-related issues lie in a range of areas. We have to think about targeted nutrition for women and children, improved water and sanitation, improving the nutrient content of staple crops, particularly through biofortification or fortification after production, and finally smooth functioning value change that will allow a variety of food choices to reach markets and consumers. We need to move towards solutions that adopt new innovations, new technologies, and improved production practices. Agriculture can be part of the solution to reduce greenhouse gas and to conserve natural resources. We have proven solutions now that must be extended and more widely adopted. Particularly the use of livestock systems that are more productive and efficient can help reduce environmental footprint of agriculture. So through the use of these science-based and information technologies, we can meet the crowing demand for food, feed, fiber, and fuel. We need to conserve the environment and natural resource space. We need to adapt to climate change and to changing markets and changing consumer preferences. And particularly what we must focus on is improving the lives of producers and those along the value chain so that we can achieve that both nutritional and food security for all. Now, how can we do that? We have to have a comprehensive approach. GHI advocates productivity, and when I talk about productivity, we're going to dig a little bit more into what that means, but particularly productivity that enables us to produce more using the same or even less natural resources. But we can't only focus on productivity alone. We have to think about how to reduce loss and waste all along the agricultural value chain. There's some very exciting innovations and technologies that our GAP report discusses that help us to really move towards zero waste, and it's a goal that we really need to achieve in the coming decades. We need to ensure access to sufficient, nutritious, affordable food. And this can be done through a variety of means, through improving the ability of consumers to purchase food by reducing poverty. We need to also think about the role of trade in ensuring that access to sufficient, nutritious, and affordable food. And finally, we really need to think about how to prioritize productive safety net programs and target them for the most vulnerable populations, particularly women and children. So enhancing and accelerating productivity is a central part of this strategy. In the past decades, as population and incomes have grown, we have been able to gradually keep up with demand, but we face a critical future challenge. Can we continue the pace of production that we need by 2050, while freezing or preferably reducing the environmental impact on the natural resource space? We must include farmers and producers of all scales and in all parts of the world as part of the solution. We have to shift to more productive and efficient agricultural value change systems, and we have to put those systems in place now. So there's a range of strategies by which we can produce more. The GAP report goes into some of these, and I'll just mention them. We can produce more by expanding land. And there are land around the world. There's available land that could be put into productive use. We can extend irrigation to land that has previously not been irrigated. This will help us produce more. We can intensify and use greater inputs per land, or we can focus on total factor productivity. Now, all of these strategies are important ways to produce more. But GHI advocates a greater focus in the future on this total factor productivity solution. What do we mean by total factor productivity? It could be measured actually by achieving greater outputs when using the inputs at a constant level, or even a reduced level. All of these strategies are important, but total factor productivity can actually help us freeze the footprint of food. So it's a ratio of agricultural outputs, gross crop and livestock, to inputs such as land, labor, livestock, machinery. As producers use these inputs more effectively and more precisely, or they adopt improved cultivation and livestock care practices, we will get more output by using a reduced or even fixed amount. On the crop side, productivity results from high yield disease and pest resistant and drought and flood tolerant crops. It may also result from efficient and timely cultivation and harvesting practices, or using technologies and data to determine precisely when and where and how much water and fertilizer to apply. When it comes to livestock, being able to better breed animals for genetic qualities and to use better animal care and disease management practices and adoption of high quality feeds will contribute to greater productivity. So GHI measures productivity each year by using FAO data and data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. You can see from this slide that there are some interesting trends decade by decade since the 1960s. You can see that in the 1960s, a lot of output for the low income countries came from land expansion and also from inputs. But decade by decade by the most recent decade for 2002 to 2011, you can see that even for low income countries, productivity is becoming a greater portion of the agricultural production, which is good news. However, what we're also seeing is a greater use of land expansion. In high income countries, by 2011, we are seeing for that final decade almost all of the agricultural output is now coming from productivity. And less and less of that output is actually coming from land expansion or inputs. So these are some interesting trends that we're seeing over time. A troubling trend, though, even in the high income countries is that over time, that total factor productivity is actually starting to decline. And this is a bit of a concern for us. GHI also looks forward to the future. How are we going to feed the coming global population both now and in the future out to 2050? And in 2010, we estimated that we would need to grow, on average, productivity-wise 1.75 percent per year out to 2050 in order to meet the future demand. How are we doing with that? Well, we're seeing that right now, for the first time in a few years, a decline in actually the rate of growth of productivity. The current rate of total factor productivity growth is only 1.69 percent per year. And while this may not seem like a huge fall-off from the rate that we need, by 2050 we're going to be seeing a gap. And what this is going to mean is that food is going to be produced. The question is, how will it be produced? Will we be extending more into land areas that are fragile or tropical? Will we be using water less sustainably? And the question remains, will we be putting into practice now what we need to do to reduce that gap by 2050? We also look each year in our gap report at regional trends. So while the global rate is not growing fast enough, we can also see that, particularly for some regions, we're seeing a major gap emerge. This slide shows that by 2030, East Asia will only be able to meet about 67 percent of their food needs if they maintain their current productivity growth rates. For Sub-Saharan Africa, the challenge is even more great. If Sub-Saharan African countries maintain their current productivity growth rates, we will see that only about 15 percent of their food demand can be met by maintaining that growth rate. The Latin American region represents an area where we have some potential for meeting some of those other regional demands. By 2030, we're expecting to see a bit of a higher growth rate in total factor productivity, which can help meet some of those global needs. Now, most of this productivity is coming from a few countries, but there's a lot of potential in Latin America to really become a future global breadbasket. For India, food demand compared to their agricultural output by 2030 is expected to meet about 60 percent. And there's a lot of things that can be done right now. The Gap Report focuses on this, practices and policies that can be put in place to narrow that gap. So what's the agricultural imperative for India look like? The Gap Report provides a special spotlight on the dynamics that are now emerging. India is at a crossroads. India, with the world's largest democracy and the second most populous nation, has a rich and diverse agricultural sector. In the two decades after independence, India struggled to ensure that enough food was available to overcome crop shortages and hunger and food insecurity. With ambitious government-led initiatives, including the Great Revolution for wheat and rice in the 60s and 70s, and then with the White Revolution and dairy, India achieved self-sufficiency in food grains by 1980, which was a very dramatic achievement. Today, India is the world's second largest rice and wheat producing country and the largest exporter of rice. It's the largest producer, consumer and importer of pulses. And it's now the world's largest producer of milk. With a stellar research and university system and with one of the largest emerging economies, India has achieved great success. But India faces new challenges for the future. Some of their productivity challenges are great. India has the largest cultivated land mass in the world and could harness this for greater productivity. But nearly 60 percent of that agricultural land is at risk due to fertilizer misuse and some poor cropping practices and soil nutrient deficiencies. Today, about 55 percent of the population in India is involved in agriculture. But as farms are divided among large families, the farm size today is about half the size it was about 40 years ago, 2.87 acres. India uses about 13 percent of the world's extracted water and 87 percent of this water is used for irrigation. Irrigation water use can be improved and we'll hear a bit more about this today from Dr. Lenton on our panel. Declining rainfall from the monsoons due to climate shifts and climate change are already impacting crop production patterns in India. About 30 percent of the harvest and post-harvest loss comes from the fruit and vegetable sector. And this must be reversed for greater nutritional content for women and children and to increase incomes of producers. Unemployment in the agriculture sector in India rose from about 9.5 percent in 1994 to 15 percent in 2005. Government subsidies for water, fertilizer and electricity have helped India produce more. But gradually these areas receiving these subsidies are beginning to decline in terms of their agricultural output. And government subsidies for buying and distributing food grains to low income houses has grown from about 2.2 percent of agricultural GDP in the 1990s to about 5 percent of agricultural GDP presently. India will be focusing more in the future on ensuring that these investments also are made in agricultural research and development and extension. What else is happening in India? Well, one of the great success stories is that India has a rising middle class and you can see from this chart what's happening out to 2030. India's growing middle class creates a new dynamic market opportunity. India has lifted about 137 million people out of poverty between 2005 and 2012. In the next 18 years, out to 2030, incomes are expected to grow at an astonishing pace, bringing almost a billion people into the middle class. This is amazing. I mean, this is quite an astonishing achievement. Dietary preferences and practices are expected to change as well. And this is illustrated by the current per capita consumption of milk and the future expected per capita consumption of milk. Grocery stores and fast foods are becoming more popular. And with the largest milk production in the world, Indian consumers now drink about a cup of milk per day, which is expected to rise to 1.5 by 2020. Nearly every drop of milk produced in India is consumed in the country and is produced by about 70 million smallholder dairy producers. India's poultry revolution is picking up pace. Domestic consumption for poultry has increased by 10 percent in the past decade, and for eggs it's been over 6 percent. Ultimately, India must, of course, not only produce more food and do so more efficiently and sustainably, but they must ensure that there is a comprehensive agricultural value chain approach, with improvements made all along the agricultural value chain. It starts at the farm level, ensuring that farmers and producers have the extension and advice that's needed and the tools in order to produce more using less. It also must involve agricultural service providers. There's a lot of new innovation, and this is discussed in the GAP report, how to extend the best practices and new technologies to smallholder farmers. Aggregators and middlemen will play a key role in the value chain. They will help store food and grain, and they will participate in the national food security programs of India. Financial service providers in India are working to create new models of credit and seasonal crop loans, as well as supporting cooperatives in dairy and particularly horticulture. New forms of financial services are taking root and extending new forms of credit, particularly to women. Risk management industries will be key in India. These will help farmers and producers manage the risk from weather, price fluctuations, and catastrophic losses. And agro processors will help add value to agricultural products and provide the critical off-farm employment that is going to be needed, as well as staple for food fortifications. Retailers can play a major role to meet the rising middle class demand in India, including specialized food stores and supermarkets. And finally, the role of the Indian consumer. It is they who are pulling more energy into this system, providing a demand for fresh fruit, vegetables, dairy, fish, poultry, and eggs. And they will help add value and seize opportunity all along the value chain for Indian growers. So in the GAP report, and hopefully we'll have time to look into it a bit later on your own, and we may be able to talk about it today, but there are a number of case studies that illustrate how revolutions in agriculture are tailoring technologies for all farmers, including small-scale farmers and especially those who are from scheduled castes and tribes. The report also focuses on how to revitalize the white revolution and to extend the blue revolution or aquaculture revolution in India. In particular, India is beginning a revolution in agriculture to boost nutrition. Fortification of staple foods and biofortification of crops are key here. Pro approaches to water use are beginning to be implemented in India. Technologies and innovations that will reduce loss and waste and help farmers to manage risk are also discussed. Pictured here is a great example of post-harvest storage by GrainPro, in which chilies and spices are being stored and preserved to add value to the food. Most importantly, revolutions in agriculture will expand the status, opportunities and incomes of women in India. This is foundational for future success of the global and the Indian food security context. So today in our panel, we're going to touch a little bit more on several policy areas, not only globally but also for India that will help improve food security. Investing in agricultural research and development, adopting and improving technology and infrastructure and science-based practices, involving the private sector, particularly in rural infrastructure development, the critical role of trade that Ambassador Vitter will talk about, and focusing on international development assistance. These are all broad policy areas that apply not only to India context, but the global agriculture and nutrition food security context. We thank you for coming today. We're now going to move to our panel, and we look forward to having a discussion, as well as hearing from each of you in the room. Thank you. Thank you, Dr. Siegler, for this wonderful presentation. Let me just move on to the next part of the program, which is the panel discussion. And let me share with you some ground rules for this morning's panel discussion. You have the bios of all the panel members in your packets, which were distributed early, and you must have found on your chairs. I will ask each, first introduce each panel member briefly, and then ask them to devote four to five minutes. They may do this thing from the seats, or they may come here if they have PowerPoint presentation. It might work better if they were here. So this is their choice. So let me just first start with the first speaker, which is Dr. Catherine Bohr. Dean Bohr is going to be speaking first, and in the order they are sitting on the podium here. She is the Dean of College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at Cornell. Dean Bohr oversees the second largest college at Cornell and shares responsibility for a statewide extension, cooperative extension service in the state of New York, along with the Dean of Cornell's College of Human Ecology. Prior to her appointment as Dean, Dr. Bohr served as Professor and Chair of the Department of Food Science at Cornell University. She earned her BS degree in food science from Cornell, master's degree from University of Wisconsin, and she received her PhD from University of California Davis, my hometown for 28 years. If I'm not dead, she has been recently appointed to the Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research as one of the 15 Board of Directors' Members. And if Dean Bohr, if you'd like to speak from there or come here, then we'll do the follow-up. And I introduce each speaker before they come. Well, thanks so much, Ambassador, and thank you for your help with my PowerPoint this morning. I'd like to thank the Center for Strategic and International Studies for bringing all of us here this morning to talk about critical food security issues. These are really important and very timely topics for us. I'm going to start my comments this morning by saying just a few words about Cornell University. During this present academic year, we are celebrating 150 years as the state of New York's land-grant institution. And what I mean by land-grant institution, it's a 150-year-old promise to provide practical education in the context of a liberal arts education for our resident students, and it's the promise to disseminate our research findings, certainly to the citizens of the state of New York, but well beyond. Now, the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at Cornell University is focused on providing what we call knowledge with public purpose. And those are in the sectors of food and energy systems, in the environmental sciences, in the life sciences, and in the social sciences. And as I said, certainly to the citizens of New York, but well beyond. Now, we do engage the public directly in devising and in implementing solutions that address agricultural, environmental, social, and economic problems. And certainly the prospect of feeding our expanding global population encompasses all of these sectors. Now, building on Dr. Ziegler's comments as we look to the future, it is clear that successful agricultural systems of the future will require effective partnerships. They will require public investment. They will require private industry financing. But very importantly, they will require acceptance and implementation by society, by our community members. We need collaborative efforts that do more than just grow more food. And no one sector of our society can do it alone. Governments must lead by setting directions and by creating environments for success. Businesses must drive implementation through innovation, through investment, and through building competition with each other. But our communities have the responsibility of building local capacity. Institutions like Cornell University, like the University of Nebraska, and like all of our peers, must push forward with research, with development, and with outreach or extension. And as illustrated so very clearly in the new GAP report, all sectors must combine efforts if we are to create a robust global agricultural economy. Now, I'd like to turn to a few specific examples and highlight a few Cornell initiatives that are actively building the kinds of partnerships that I'm describing here in the U.S. and around the world, but with a particular focus on the activities that we have ongoing in India. So one of our recent initiatives is creation of the Tata Cornell Agriculture and Nutrition Initiative. This initiative is led by professor and director Dr. Prabhu Pingali and this initiative reflects investment from the private sector that's based in India to address problems that are associated with poverty, with malnutrition, and the needs to improve rural development. Now our student scholars, our faculty fellows, and our external research fellows work alongside partner institutes in India, and those include the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, otherwise known as TISS, and Delhi University, for example, as well as many others to address issues that are at that nexus of agriculture and nutrition. Also of particular relevance in India is the Borlaug Global Rust Initiative, and this is a Cornell-led consortium of more than 100 researchers worldwide who are working together to reduce vulnerability of wheat, yellow, and leaf rusts. Now this initiative was formed in 2008 and it also includes among others, and many others that is, the India Center for Agricultural Research and State Agricultural Universities, the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas, the International Maze and Wheat Improvement Center, and UN Food and Agricultural Organization, otherwise known as FAO. This initiative is working to closely monitor, to do research, and to rapidly disseminate information rust pathogen known as UG-99 that was discovered in Uganda in 1999. This pathogen has already spread to Kenya, to Ethiopia, Sudan, Yemen, and Iran, and strains have also been found in South Africa and Zimbabwe. Now because of the destructiveness and the economic and food security importance of wheat, which is the host for this pathogen, our scientists are collaborating globally to find solutions to controlling this pathogen and the strains enters India, or other major wheat producing areas of the world. Cornell also plays a leading role in the Agriculture Innovation Partnership, which is a consortium of American or U.S. and Indian universities working together to increase agricultural production, to develop efficient marketing systems, and to reduce malnutrition, while creating sustainable agriculture businesses in India. The partnership is improving agricultural education and extension systems, and by creating a convergence of public and private enterprises that are focused on ensuring prosperity in the region. For example, this partnership has helped India's state agricultural universities re-examine and revamp their curricula and their extension programming. Further, Cornell is building the Cornell Alliance for Science, which is a platform for the public and policymakers about agricultural technology, and this has a very specific focus on developing an informed dialogue around genetically modified crops. In particular, we are focused on working with scientists, working with the media, and working with public policymakers to enable conversations, taking the rhetoric out of the conversations, regarding science-based technologies that will help meet production. Now, we could not undertake such initiatives, the ones that I've described, without the support of organizations such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which helped to launch the Cornell Alliance for Science. The Foundation also supports the Borlaug Global Rust Initiative's Durable Wheat Resistance in Wheat Project, and also USAID supports the Agricultural Innovation Partnership with a $9.6 million grant. These are just some of the initiatives that Cornell has undertaken to address very critical global needs. I believe that only by leveraging public and private resources, working with the government, working with communities, can we support the scientific and technological research, innovation, and development of effective partnerships that are needed to create a thriving global agricultural economy. And I believe that by participating in conversations like the one that we're having today, truly gives me hope that we will succeed. I thank you. Thank you, Dean Bohr. Our next speaker is my pleasure to introduce Dr. Roberto Lenten. Lenten, I apologize. Roberto Lenten, who is one of the foremost experts in water management and development. Dr. Lenten is the executive director of the Robert Doherty Water for Food Institute at University of Nebraska. His early work in South Asia laid the foundation for the International Water Management Institute, which now has a significant global presence and impact. He also has been director of the United Nations Development Program Sustainable Energy and Environment Division in New York, where he worked closely with colleagues and partners, institutions, to help launch the global water partnership. Dr. Lenten received degrees from the universities in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and MIT. Please join me in welcoming Dr. Lenten. Well, thank you very much, Ambassador Sidriqi, for your introduction. And thanks for the help with the slides. And most of all, thank you for inviting me to join this panel discussion today. I've been asked to talk about sustainable agriculture and water and environment in India particularly, and I did have the good fortune of being involved in activities in India since the late 70s. In fact, spending 15 years in South Asia, six of those in India in the 80s and 90s, and then since that time having a number of collaborations in India, including right now with the Indian Agricultural Research Institute and Jane Irrigation. So it's been a really interesting period to see what has happened in India. And as Margaret was emphasizing earlier and as is really highlighted in the GAP report, in the GHI report, it's just astounding the progress that India has made during those years. It's really unpowered and so remarkable that it moved from a situation of being food self-sufficient to being a significant exporter and during that period also lifting huge numbers of people out of poverty. So the progress that India has made on the food security and poverty front is really quite remarkable. The question, I guess, that arises is well at what cost did that happen? And there's one figure in the GAP report, which is what you're seeing on the screen right now, which illustrates the impact that that huge development in terms of food security and food production had on the country's water resources. And it's really quite astounding what has happened in terms of irrigated area. On the one hand, you see a fairly steady increase in surface water irrigation, but you also see a dramatic increase in groundwater irrigation during that period. So you're talking about from the period that I was there, when I first started visiting India, it was about 30 million hectares of irrigated land and now you have something like 65 million hectares of irrigated land, so that's more than a doubling. And this is really quite in contrast to other parts of the world. China has really held steady in terms of its water use during that period. So the increase in India is really not something that you've seen replicated in other parts of the world, also not replicated among its neighbors. So that has to be a big, big worry. It has to be seen in that context, remarkable success, but really a big impact in terms of achieving that success to a significant extent as a result of increasing irrigation, increasing water use. And that has consequences. It means that in parts of India, the groundwater has been rapidly declining with all kinds of impacts, and it also means that there's simply less water for the future. So going forward, I think the lesson is very, very clear. The country simply cannot do in the next 40 years what it has done in the last 40 years. Now, one of the things about India as most other countries is that it's remarkably diverse. And so when you talk about India as a whole, you've got to always make caveats about, well, there's here and there's there, and things differ. One of the things that water resource specialists around the world have tried to do over the last few years is unpack the concept of water scarcity. And particularly to unpack it in terms of where is it that there is physical water shortage, where we simply don't have enough water to be able to meet demands. And where, by contrast, do we have economic water scarcity, which means that the water is there, but there isn't the, that people don't have access to it, primarily because of poverty, also because of poor institutions and so on. And if you look at this global map, in red you have the areas where you have economic water scarcity, and in brown you have where there's physical water scarcity. And in India, you'll see a bit of both. You'll see in the northern, Gangetic Plains areas where there is relatively plentiful water, where the key issue there is economic water scarcity. So you've got to figure out ways to ensure that poor farmers can get access to the water. But in the south, and in the northwest, you have physical water scarcity, where you see the declining water tables and so on. So all this means be careful in terms of solutions. There isn't one solution fits all. You have to have one solution or one set of solutions where you have economic water scarcity in terms of improving access. But another set where you have physical water scarcity, where you've got to focus on controlling the water supply. The last thing that I would say in these few minutes is that going forward, the solution isn't only in terms of... Well, let me back up a little bit. Clearly going forward, what India has to do and as Margaret was emphasizing around the world, just producing more with less. I mean, I think that's an overall lesson. That's what the concept of total water factor productivity is all about. In the water domain, it means producing more with less pressure on water resources, both in quantity terms and in quality terms. The point that I would emphasize is that that principle has to be across the spectrum of rain fed and irrigated agriculture. So it's not simply that irrigated agriculture in India is being mismanaged. It's a question of how can you get the most bang for the buck across the spectrum? How can you use water more effectively across the spectrum? And that is important because in irrigated agriculture you're managing the water that you can see, what is called the blue water in rain fed agriculture, you're managing water as well. And there are ways in which you can manage that water that can really unlock the potential of rain fed agriculture. So when thinking about solutions, think across the spectrum from rain fed to irrigated and how can you make the best use of water in both those environments. That's all I wanted to say for now. Thank you very much again. Thank you, Dr. Linton. I appreciate your comments. Next we'll hear private sector perspective on agriculture, food security, and how to support small-holder farmers as part of this important solution to the coming global demand for food. With us this morning is Ms. Lister Ntwan, a Global Director for Sustainable Agriculture Development at Dupont. She's responsible for leading the implementation of agricultural development initiatives that help small-holder farmers improve their livelihoods and increase their contribution to the value chain through the adoption of improved technologies and greater access to finance, production, support, and markets. Lister represents Dupont on the World Economic Forum's new vision for agriculture project board, Grow Africa, and the FAO Committee on Food Security Private Sector Mechanism. Prior to joining Dupont, pioneer at the end of April 2012, Lister spent over 16 years at the World Bank. She must have started when she was 15, I suppose. So, Lister, we are looking forward to your presentation. I must add that she holds an MBA degree from SUNY Buffalo and JD from Georgetown University Law Center here in Washington, D.C. Please help me welcome Lister Ntwan either there or you have choice. Thank you. Thank you so much, Ambassador Siddiqui, for this warm welcome and also to CSIS for having me here today and particularly to discuss this report produced by GHI, which really focuses on, you know, the global revolution in agriculture, the challenges and promise of 2050. So as Ambassador Siddiqui mentioned, we work with Dupont pioneer in particular. I look at how do we support and work to help smallholder farmers become much more productive. It's not that within Dupont pioneer we think that this segment of the agriculture industry is the only segment. Of course, we work a lot with other segments, but we recognize that in the world, given the importance of smallholder farmers for producing what we eat and the importance in a lot of the region, such as South Asia and Africa, we have to place particular emphasis on supporting them to become much more productive. At Dupont, we expressed our interest and our commitment to food security back in 2012 when we promulgated our food security goals. Those goals are threefold. They talked about the fact that we would invest over $10 billion in research to support innovations that support food and nutrition security by 2050 and that we would produce over 4,000 new products in that time. The second goal had to do with our commitment to supporting youth in agriculture. We determined that we would create over 2 million youth engagements in agriculture. And the third has to do with supporting rural communities and smallholder farmers. And for that, we determined that we would support over 3 million smallholder farmers and their communities to become much more engaged and productive in agriculture. These challenges, of course, that we laid for ourselves, we made them public so that we could be held publicly accountable. And today, we're pleased that so far we've been making good progress on the achievement of each of these goals. As Margaret mentioned in the GHI report, what we see today are trends that support urbanization, rapid urbanization. And with that comes a move of particularly youth to urban areas that also we're looking at joblessness among young people. And so our emphasis on supporting youth to see the value of agriculture and to see agriculture as a way of life that does not match the drudgery that they saw their forefathers engage in is an important element of what we see as important as we look towards 2050. We also see in terms of that horizon we're seeing, as Margaret mentioned, much more changes in dietary composition and now in taste as well as we see greater demand for meat for dairy products and eggs, et cetera. We also know that climate change is going to call for us to make much smarter decisions in agriculture and that we change our practices to ensure that we are producing much more efficiently, meaning producing more with less. And we also stated that today, particularly for DuPont, we see that no one company, no one country, no one entity can move this needle on its own. And so we at DuPont believe in collaboration as we address these challenges. We also believe that science is global but that solutions need to be local. They need to be tailored to the environments in which they are supposed to operate. We are looking to collaborations to unlock answers to these challenges we have now in agriculture. We also believe that science must become local wisdom. And as we talk about that, you'll see that as we take our science globally, even with examples that I would share in India, we're trying most of all to ensure that farmers actually understand how to apply science so that they can become much more informed and much more productive as they apply some of these solutions and that of course the solutions must be sustainable over time. So with that, I want to say that particularly when we look at the importance of smallholder farmers, we see them as agents of change. We believe that agriculture continues to offer the greatest potential for sustainable development and poverty reduction in developing countries. Agriculture is still the single largest employee in the world, providing livelihoods and jobs for 40% of today's global population. And for 70% of the world's poor who live in rural areas, agriculture is the main source of income and employment. As has been said before by my fellow panelists, India has made significant progress in its agriculture over the years. We all know of the green revolution in India and we're seeing now that challenges remain even to 2050. The GHI report outlines some of the key aspects of Indian agriculture today. One of the things that Dupont is doing is that we are working very closely with farmers, Indian farmers, to produce better and more rice, better and more corn, particularly in the Punjab region. We are working with farmers there where we know, for example, that nearly 80% of the poultry feed in India is comprised of corn. As that industry grows, so does the demand for corn. Maze production expanded from 12.04 million metric tons in 2001 to 14.71 million metric tons in 2006 and to 21.73 million metric tons in 2011. This expanding demand has improved prices, enticing more farmers to produce corn and the adoption of hybrid seeds is increasing yields per acre. So while this is happening, at the same time the Indo-Ganjatic plain aquifer is decreasing by an alarming rate. We now recognize that, together with the Indian government, they are encouraging farmers who grow rice in the three affected states to diversify from rice to corn, which requires one-fifth of the amount of water to grow. We are helping farmers make that transition in partnership with the government of Punjab. We are also looking at maximizing hybrid rice yield potential in India. We're working again with smallholder farmers. We're supporting them through what we call India Farm Schools to help them understand how to take these new technology through hybrids, how to plant, how to intensify their planting, how to ensure that they're getting the most out of their very small acreages. As you know, and as was mentioned before by Ambassador Siddiqui, we're looking at acreages, average acreages of farms decreasing over time. And so with that, I want to stop and say that we are committed to supporting agriculture in all of these markets. We see the role of the private sector as particularly important and we are committed to working with others in the public sector, with governments, with farmers who we consider to be agents of change to ensure that we can meet the demands in the future in the face of climate change. Thank you. And finally, to address the important role trade plays in ensuring global agriculture market access and food security, we'll hear from Ambassador Darcy Wetter in my former life, my colleague and friend and still continue, I hope, to be my friend. We'll hear from Darcy. She is currently the host of the position of Chief Agricultural Trade Negotiator at USTR. She is responsible for bilateral and multilateral negotiations and policy coordination regarding agricultural trade within the US government. Prior to joining USTR, she served as USTA undersecretary where she oversaw the department's international activities at USDA. She held key responsibilities in the job in international trade negotiations and export assistance programs and coordinated USDA's role in international food aid. Prior to that, she served as international trade advisor on the Democratic staff of the US Senate Committee on Finance. She received her master's degree in public affairs from Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton and her undergraduate degree from Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa. So please join me in welcoming Ambassador Darcy Wetter. Thank you very much, Ambassador Siddiqui. I am proud to call you my friend still. And I thank you very much for inviting me to be here today. Thank you as well to CSIS and to the Global Harvest Initiative for hosting this discussion. This discussion really is critically important given the resource and the population challenges that have been outlined so clearly for us by the previous panelists. And, you know, often we have sort of separate conversations about improving agricultural productivity, about natural resource problems, and about trade as a separate matter. And in fact, they are very much entwined. And I think one of the... my title might be Chief Agricultural Negotiator, but one of the things I like best are these kinds of opportunities to be more of an agricultural collaborator in bringing those sort of two worlds together and look at solving some of these critical problems for us. Just as research and natural resource use are critical to food security, so is trade. Trade is actually essential if we want to reach really that overall definition of food security where you have food that is available, affordable, and meets the full nutritional needs of those who consume it. I want to particularly thank the Global Harvest Initiative because their work has made trade central to the discussion about how it is that we should achieve food security in a way that has not... perhaps has not been done so fully in the past. And I want to talk a little bit today just about some key elements where good trade policy is good food security policy and can foster those food security goals. My comments are not specific to India. I think they apply in India as well as many of our other trading partners around the world. At its most basic, your sort of economics 101, we talk about trade as its purpose is to move goods that are in surplus to areas where they are in deficit to take advantage of supply and demand to meet the needs of those who wish to trade and those who have a need for the goods being traded. And, frankly, that's what we have to do in an era where we have this growing population by 2050 and we have, frankly, different capacities for production of different kinds of agricultural products. Again, a varied diet, as we talked about, with that growing middle class is important and not every place in the globe will be the production center that needs to be the consumption center. So we need to think about how we move goods efficiently and in reducing loss and moving the loss and reducing them or producing them and sharing them in an affordable way. A few elements of that trade policy that are essential to achieving food security and, frankly, to reducing barriers to trade in those products are tariffs. First of all, keeping them low, keeping them predictable and constant, particularly for staple foods that need to move regionally across borders. Two is to reduce the barriers of border measures to make sure they're transparent, that border procedures are carried out quickly. And three, that we have clear and widely adopted international standards for assessing food safety, animal and plant health issues, and this includes the ability to assess and allow trade in new technologies, including biotechnology. Our goal here of increasing productivity to feed a growing population is not only providing enough calories globally, but the right calories for that nutritional profile and also boosting farmer income. I think we forget sometimes that some of the most food insecure people in the world are those who are producing some of that food. And so we need to have them be in a position not only where they are producing that surplus, but that they can get it to market to achieve the ability then to purchase other foods and make their families more food secure. But you can't sell your product without access to markets. And so when it comes to tariff and border measures, often we talk about development projects and increasing market information for farmers to take their goods to a nearby market. What do prices look like today? But that nearby market is often on the other side of an international border. If you're a farmer producing near a border, it might be much easier to have your product travel a couple of hours across that border rather than an entire day to the capital city of the country in which you live. And so having real access to that market not facing high tariffs for your product, good transportation and infrastructure developed to help facilitate that trade are all very important. And frankly, some of the highest tariffs that we see in the global marketplace are among and between countries that are neighbors that face similar food security challenges for their farmers and for their city populations, but also that produce similar crops and have similar diets. So they're producing those exact same kinds of staple crops that their neighbors need, but they can't get those products to the market that would be most efficient for them. So regional cooperation on lowering tariffs on staple foods could go a long way to encouraging food security. And it's important not only that this would boost farmer income and deliver those crops to market, but I think we have to remember that a number of these products are perishable. And so the more that we improve storage at those borders and reduce the distance that those crops have to travel, the more we also reduce post harvest loss and improve the quality and nutrition of those products for the end consumer. Now, once those crops reach the border, maybe the tariff is clear, maybe that tariff is lower, and they can get the product to the border, but what happens to it there? Is it clear that the products will be quickly processed, that the paperwork that has to accompany them is transparent, that there are storage facilities at the border that can assist with that delay between the time a product arrives and it is delivered to the importer? Is there electronic processing of records that can prevent corruption or theft or under invoicing some of the problems that we can see at the border sometimes? These are critically important for all trading partners to have these procedures in place, but particularly so for ag products, again, because of the perishability and the quality loss that can accompany long delays at the border. And a key opportunity to help streamline these kinds of procedures at borders and to help regularize the procedures that all countries will use is, of course, advancing the trade facilitation agreement at the WTO that works to have all countries working to improve the way that trade is conducted. And so I'm particularly pleased that last week the U.S. and India were able to announce that we have reached an agreement that will break the impasse and allow this to go forward at the WTO and I think be a boost to how trade and agriculture and other products are conducted. The third area I mentioned is the area of international standards. If you look at the curve, I wish I'd sort of brought the graph that always stuns me every time I see it, when you look at just the increase in volume of agricultural trade, but also in the variety of that trade, particularly over the last 20 years or so, it's really astonishing that a lot more food is moving and a lot greater variety of that food is reaching citizens around the world. And that, frankly, will only increase as diets change and as more and more middle-class citizens are demanding more protein-type products. But we have to ensure that the food that is delivered is safe, that importers have confidence that that food is safe and that there is an ability to scientifically assess whether new production methods, whether that be new technologies like biotechnology, use of new vet drugs, and use of new food additives that may appear in foods at the border can be properly assessed. And, frankly, it's pretty difficult for countries to be able to do that on their own. The United States, that has a very sophisticated food safety system and a very professional animal and plant health inspection service has difficulty keeping up with the new innovations in agriculture and conducting the appropriate risk assessments to make sure that animal, plant, and human health is properly protected. Now imagine if your entire animal and plant health inspection service is five or 10 scientists and some of our developing country partners, but that your citizenry is still expecting access to affordable and high quality protein products. This makes the work of the international standard setting bodies that are available and working through the FAO and other organizations absolutely critical to maintaining food security and a safe and affordable food supply. These international standards are, of course, developed internationally by groups of scientists where they come up with a regional representative diet. They look at scientific expertise from around the world and establish what are appropriate residue levels. They look at assessing the safety of products of new technology and regulators in countries around the world can count on those to know that they're making good decisions at the border to allow products in and know that they're safe for their populations. So these standards are important again for that border agent who wants to make a good decision for national regulatory authorities to have confidence that the products they allow to their populations are safe, but they are equally important to the farmer and the business owner, particularly small and medium sized enterprises who are trying to figure out how to increase their income by entering the global marketplace and participating in trade. It's simply impossible for some of these small holders to meet a different standard in each and every country so they know that they can tailor their products, they can tailor their processes to meet one international standard and have that product accepted in many markets is critical to their success and the dissemination of their products. I would just note at the end here that really listening to markets is key and critically important for our producers of food. There are a lot of very well intentioned food security policies that in the short term can frankly backfire in terms of farmer decisions in the long term. Producers need to have access to real and accurate market decisions or market information in order to make good decisions about their production. We've seen policies in response to the 2008 price crisis like export bans that prohibited product from leaving countries in order to bring down prices for those created disincentive for the farmers in that country to continue to produce and can exacerbate and recur these conditions in the long term. Higher subsidized prices for products also encourage production that perhaps the land and water situation cannot support and perhaps change production decisions in a way where farmers could be making more diverse decisions about what products enter the marketplace and that consumers need. And access to accurate market signals is important. And last I was particularly pleased to hear that Margaret made a plug for those agricultural services at the pace that technology is being developed and implemented it's critical that small holder farmers around the world have access to new technologies and understand how to deploy them effectively. And so trade not only in goods and in agricultural products but in services and knowledge in order to change farmer behavior. And as Margaret said so nicely encourage the use of inputs more precisely and effectively. And so one more aspect of good trade policy is encouraging trade and services as well. So again thank you very much for being here. Those are sort of my general thoughts on trade and I'll look forward to the discussion. Thank you. Thank you very much. Now comes the fun part of this morning we will have a more interactive discussion involving you and the panel. So we'll divide this discussion in two parts. First allow me to pose few questions to the distinguished panel. This will get the discussion going only that involve more interaction and cross-partalization of ideas between the speakers and our panelists. And then we'll open up for question answers. So starting with Dr. Ziegler and Dean Bohr let me ask a question which has to do with your presentations. What kind of trends do you see for future demand for food and agriculture products? And what are the trends you're seeing especially in the value-added products in general around the world and especially in Asia with a special focus on India? Dr. Ziegler. Okay. Particularly in India let me start there. The demand for dairy is really growing exponentially. I mean the gap report moves into that. But you know with India is a bit of a special case with being primarily in many parts of the country vegetarian. However we're seeing that demand for dairy, horticulture products particularly higher value products, fresh fruits, vegetables and the the desire for processed foods is growing as well. There's a real opportunity that India has to really make those processed products more nutritious. I think that in some ways India could really be an example. Local industry, we've talked about Jane irrigation, we mentioned that today we have some great case studies in the gap report fruit juices, fruit products, processed foods and then gradually moving more into the eggs, poultry and dairy sectors. That's all really growing in India. And even with gradually some growth into livestock as well. But in other parts of the world definitely poultry and aquaculture I think you're going to see a lot of demand for that. And the question is how to make sure that feed for that livestock is very efficient and can actually reduce the carbon footprint of livestock and poultry production. So feed conversion ratios, feed use efficiency is really a great area of focus. It can enable us to have fewer animals but each animal can produce more. More dairy, more milk, more eggs while maintaining the size of a herd or reducing even the size. So those kinds of productivity focuses I think are going to be very important. So that response was so beautiful but actually I have very little to add on top of that other than two points building on some comments from our other panelists about science being global but solutions really needing to be local. And one thing about this booming dairy industry in India is that the vast majority of the milk that's produced there comes from water buffaloes. So you really can't take the technology that is the predominant technology here in the United States and just transfer it that way. You really have to make sure that you're focused on what makes sense in country. So I just wanted to make that particular point. The second point in building on the ambassador's point and that is and the data that are in the GAP report and I really urge you to read that report and that is if we don't take seriously this need to enhance productivity without further burdening our environmental system in fact we will end up making the trade situation that much more crucial because we will end up with a situation where the countries are unable to really enhance their own food security and I just really want to make that point. Thank you. My next question is directed to Dean Boer and Mr. Antwon. How do today's agricultural and productivity practices differ from the first green revolution? That's part one first question. Second is how we can increase productivity and at the same time contribute to environmental sustainability. And I'll start on that one and one of the things about the green revolution in many parts of the world that is better seeds are there certain technologies are there but as our ambassador told us this morning in many cases the various countries around the world are unable to really fully take advantage of agricultural technology because of a lack of fundamental investment in rural infrastructure that would enable movement of food from areas of plenty to areas where food is needed where we need real development of markets and we need the opportunity for our producers really to get fair prices for their products. We need adequate financing for our farmers. We need to ensure some crop insurance to help protect our producers against weather disasters and we really need some financial buffering to help our producers so it's not just the technology that will provide the solutions that comes from any of these revolutions but it's really about the entire infrastructure that we are able to provide for our producers and in fact the entire food system but with regard to the things that we can do to enhance beyond technology to enhance what we're doing or in addition to technology we really do need to look at enhancing presently unusable soils there are opportunities to really build soil health and to enhance productivity that way. We do need to focus on the genetic potential of our farming systems to make sure that we are using crops that are appropriate for the area in which they're grown for example if it's an area that suffers from drought that we're using drought resistant strains that have been identified as such in that area we do need to improve management of crops and animal systems so that we're capturing the manure for example moving that back into the farming systems we need to push for better nutritional value of the crops that we're producing and that's a way to help the entire system we certainly need to decrease water usage on a per unit per crop basis. We need to look at ways to control competition from weeds and from predators and we need to reduce losses from diseases and insects and certainly we need to help reduce that 30% loss of products that we heard about and there are many different cost effective ways that we can go about doing that and absolutely absolutely it's about providing information and and some reasonable resources to our producers but no single response it really has to be a holistic approach no single response is going to solve this problem. Thank you Ambassador Siddiqui on the what what can we do and how the practices today are different from those in the green revolution when we consider the green revolution in those times we were coming from a pretty low agriculture base and so moving the needle then involved at that time really just a focus on moving from open pollinated varieties to sort of new high yielding varieties and a lot of that at the time we could bring increased areas of the cultivation etc. Today what's different is that we're moving from we're trying to move the needle from a base that's much higher and that requires a different approach today we're looking at moving from OPVs to hybrids we're looking at what research and development could do as Dean Bohr mentioned to ensure that we're taking better technology and using that technology in local circumstances that are suited to the particular technology and so as we look at now even as we consider sustainability what are some of those technologies that provide drought resistant varieties or water tolerant varieties how can we use those now more effectively I think some of the key things that are different now is that we're also looking at value chain development not only just looking at increased productivity because we know that if we focus only on increasing productivity and farmers have no markets or there are no tight linkages from farm to fork we end up in situations that could be even worse where we have farmers then not having an incentive to produce because there's no market or the market information is so skewed that we're not actually getting the best out of a particular market we also need to look at focusing on the demographics now of farming we know particularly within Dupont Pioneer we have made a focus on women in agriculture important for us and that's because so many women we know that if women have you know half the resources that men have in agriculture they can produce up to twice what they're doing and make a huge impact on food security going forward so we were looking at not only women on the farm but supporting women scientists as well so that they can help make decisions that can impact the plight of women in agriculture and we know that when women have more control of their productive resources the nutrition of their children improves decisions are made in the home that affect the well-being and nutrition of children their education, their health overall health those are improved as was mentioned before now today what's different is that we're looking we need to look at reductions in loss and waste and that becomes an important consideration as we look at some of the sustainability aspects that are looming now and that would become even more challenging as climate change continues to affect us and the one area as well that we need to look at is how we can make these communities more resilient how we can focus on resilience so that communities, farmers countries can really bounce back from shocks and return to post shock performances even in the face of shocks that we cannot predict going forward and how do we support policies that allow for more resilience thank you very much my next question is Dr. Lenton in your preparatory remarks you mentioned about nearly doubling the size of the agriculture in India as well as the depletion of the water underground water so how is India going to cope with the need for water in agriculture especially in the face of volatility in monsoons as well as declining water underground water capacity very good well thank you Ambassador for that question I think a big part of the answer has to be in terms of simply making better use of the water that is available some of the comments that I was making earlier and Margaret made as well were very much in that direction how can you improve the productivity of water and rain fed agriculture make sure that you use the green water effectively but also in irrigated systems do the same with the water that is extracted the other side of the equation it seems to me that is really important here is that in monsoonal climates like India you do have very plentiful water during some months of the year and then you have dry for the rest of the year so a big part of it has to be to be able to capture that water when it rains it is as simple as that and a lot of the water that rains that falls during the monsoon simply runs off and simply either evaporates or is not used productively so being able to capture that enabling small farmers to be able to capture that water before it runs off is really important a lot of that has to do with groundwater how you can use groundwater effectively so that you can make sure that the water goes into the ground instead of evaporating or running off there is a lot of discussion in India right now about the possibility of not simply capturing water when it is plentiful in the monsoon sense and keeping it for the dry season also capturing the water in those parts of the country where water is plentiful and transferring them the same waters to those parts of the country where water is less plentiful and you saw the map that I showed with these kinds of differences and it is called the river linking project and there is a lot of debate within India on this personally I am skeptical I think one would want to be much quite careful about that I know that other countries like China are doing that kind of huge big transfer of water my personal view is it is relatively simpler to be able to capture water when it is plentiful in time than to move it long distances and then connecting with the trade discussion it is much easier to transport food than it is to transport the water that goes into producing food so I would be careful about that kind of an option Thank you very much let me now shift the discussion on critical investments Dean Boer you mentioned about investment agriculture research so my next question is addressed to both Dean Boer and Dr. Lenten since both of you are affiliated with some distinguished agriculture institutions both in the northeast and the Midwest looking like for critical investments in agriculture research and extension and why is this funding so important I'll start with that and the future of funding in agriculture as I mentioned at least from my perspective is really working across public-private partnerships that means foundations as well as private industry and as well as government sources at this point it is pretty clear to me that really no one sector forces all of the vision and all of the opportunities to make these types of challenges undertaken and to move forward we need new collaborations between government between private industry and certainly between academic institutions including those that are represented here now one example of such an entity like this that's just newly emerged is the new foundation for food and agricultural research that is here in the United States that emerged as part of the Farm Bill that was just signed into law relatively recently and this particular foundation will be focusing on issues that are not necessarily just related to U.S. concerns and in fact those conversations are underway with regard to scoping the outreach of this entire program but the issues that this foundation will be addressing are clear and those are plant and animal health food safety, nutrition and health renewable energy, natural resources and environment agricultural food security and agricultural systems and technology so you can see very wide ranging issues those are certainly not issues that are unique and only relevant to the U.S. but have global reach and I believe that it will be partnerships such as this new foundation for food and agricultural research that will be essential to address the large scale problems that we are looking at as we look to the future I would like to build on the point that Dean Moore just made about the need to really have this as a public and private effort and coming to the case of India India clearly has outstanding institutions in both the public and the private sector with in recent years I think an increasing dynamism from the private sector in India you have the Indian Council of Agricultural Research you have under the council a very large number of institutions with top quality scientists working on a wide range of issues but then you have groups like Jane Irrigation on the private sector that have huge research and development wings themselves I visited Jane Irrigation in Jalgaon in India a couple of times and they have a huge campus with facilities they're not just doing research on how to make better drip irrigation systems they're working on drought tolerant crops they're working on just a range of issues that go way beyond the narrow mission in which they are working so there's a huge amount of dynamism in that sector let me add just a couple of things that may be less well known but also shows the dynamism in India the philanthropic sector in India I think is emerging as important I think you were mentioning Dean Boor the Tata program that Cornell is involved in the Rappasettas of India the Tata company and that family foundation and it just shows the potential of the philanthropic sector in India and a related development is the dynamism of the NGO sector a lot of the really creative things that are happening in agriculture and water management involving communities is in fact build on and admire and use thank you thank you very much let me direct my next question to Alistair Antoine we know that we can increase productivity and we can also have technologies where we can be more sustainable and have less impact on the environment but what is most important especially with your focus on smallholder farmers and women farmers how do we get them connected to better markets as well as we how they benefit in their livelihoods and increasing the incomes because this is where big challenge lies especially in Sub-Saharan Africa thank you so much Ambassador Seliki it's a very good question one that perhaps I would use an example of a collaboration to answer with back in 2012 we designed a program to support smallholder farming in Ethiopia we recognize as we said before that smallholder farmers are critical in terms of their support to food security in their countries but we recognize as well that in order to support poverty reduction and improving livelihoods in these countries and for this important sector of the population we've got to ensure that they their productivity increases their incomes increase so that their diets can be improved and their children can go to school and they could have a much more rich quality of life than they enjoy presently and so we looked at what do we bring to the table as do we recognize that what we bring is the technology that has been developed particularly for Ethiopia because we've spent a lot of time testing our products to ensure that they're suitable in those environments we bring as well the agronomic expertise the advice on how these technologies should be used which is extremely critical but then we looked along the value chain and also recognized that we didn't have all the competencies along that value chain in order to make the type of step change that we wanted to make and so we talked with the government of Ethiopia to understand what their strategy for agriculture was they have a very elaborate agriculture growth plan that also itemizes that the development of the maize sector in Ethiopia was an important priority for the government and so we tried then to determine which other partners that we could work with who would share the objectives we had but would also be able to provide competencies further along the value chain and so we identified the government of Ethiopia through its Ministry of Agriculture and Agriculture Transformation Agency and we're working very closely with the I.D. through its the Future Bureau that is supporting this project to actually deliver on several objectives one to increase the productivity of small holder farmers two to reduce post harvest losses by building more storage facilities three to ensure that these small holder farmers have better access to inputs and that includes not only the seed but fertilizer and also credit to link these farmers directly to markets and so with that program we are providing access for farmers to work with the existing corporatives with the farmer training units in Ethiopia but then with aggregators such as the World Food Program in Ethiopia and so in that program one additional objective was also to create farmer dealers so that farmers have better access to inputs where they are so they don't have to travel great distances in order to receive inputs and so in that program we're actually reaching over a hundred thousand small holder farmers we've already seen that yields for these farmers have increased astronomically where these farmers were getting one ton per hectare last year with the at the end of the planting season our average was 6.8 tons per hectare several of these farmers and several who are women because we're also trying very hard to support women small holder farmers by identifying them but we also recognize that we've got to work within the cultural norms of the environments that we work and so we're trying to be very sensitive to social customs but the women who participate in the program are excited we have women who talk about now being able to send their children to school now being able to set up little shops in the village center and we have women as well who are including men who are also reporting increased annual income of US dollars and so we see this as a model for ensuring that we can reach small holder farmers not only with not only on the upstream end with the technology but also working with partners to ensure and with governments to ensure that we can link them from farm to market and develop the entire value chain thank you Mr. last but not the least Ambassador Witter it always amazes me attending meetings or tuning in most of the time the focus is how do you address food security through food self-sufficiency although you made some very salient points on the role of trade in addressing food security I'm still at a loss that we have failed to really convey to folks both in the media as well as other countries especially in developing countries Dr. Lenton you mentioned instead of moving more environmentally important and environmentally important to import food from food plus areas to produce food in deficient areas so my question to you Mr. Witter is what do you think is the reason that we don't see as much discussion about the positive contribution of trade in food security that is a very tough question I think it is right that in a number of the international meetings that you and I have sometimes attended together and this builds a little bit on what Ambassador Siddiqui posed to Ambassador Wetter getting better over time and opportunities getting better in terms of diversity of opportunity knock down the door introduce myself as the Dean of the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences two dead silent are committed to providing solutions that are accepted in the