 Ladies and gentlemen, it's a pleasure to be here and thanks to Tom Arnold, who happens to have been called away today for making this meeting possible. It's a great pleasure to be in Dublin and to be with you and to share some of my thoughts with you. I would leave the part on IFAT, only to say that we have a commitment to fighting hunger and poverty, improving nutrition, particularly in fragile states. Development matters very deeply to IFAT and to me in particular. I have dedicated my professional life to fighting, to fight against poverty and hunger from my early years as an entomologist, a field entomologist in the Congo and now as president of IFAT and in between I worked in the CGI system, the consultative group for international, which are research where I ended up as director general at the Africa Rice Center in Kauake, Côte d'Ivoire. But my friend believer that this fight is one that I know that we can win and we must win it because failure to win it costs more than fighting it itself. The cost of failure in economic and humanitarian terms is simply too high for us not to do it. But you cannot win a war or you cannot win a fight by just sitting at home and talking about it. You have to go out there. We know that the main enemy of hunger and poverty as we just described is inequality in all its forms. And for us, we know where it strikes most. As I said earlier at lunch, when you look at poverty in a global scale, we know where it exists. It exists mostly in developing countries, 75 to 80 percent of the poor live in currently described developing countries. And where do we find them in these countries, in the rural areas? They live in rural areas. And what is the primary source of livelihood? Agriculture. So if you're going to fight poverty, you have to go where it exists. You have to find out what makes people poor. And to achieve the 2015 or post-2015 development goals, we have to take this fight to the enemy, to its base. It is not just by simply increasing our resources that we give in terms of development assistance. It's how it is used to transform these rural areas. I'll give you a couple of examples why I believe that the way we approach development has not succeeded and why it has not succeeded. We often wait until the problem becomes a crisis when it is too late. We know that it's easier to fix a problem and it costs far less than even paying for emergency when the problem has become a crisis. We all know it. Let's take the case of Ebola. Ebola is not new. It first occurred in the 70s in Congo, then Zaire, but it was ignored for 40 years. Because it happened in some rural countries, rural areas of Congo, of Uganda. It happened to people who are not normally seen, not seen by the politicians, by the media, what we call the forgotten world, the invisible world. But it's only when Ebola then crossed the African deserts into Europe and then crossed the oceans into the United States what happened? The world began to tremble. But 40 years, it happened. It even happened as late as 2012 in Uganda. It didn't make the headlines. So today, what has it cost us? The Irish government has contributed to helping to solve the crisis. The total cost of Ebola cannot even be put in terms of monetary terms because you cannot equate over 10,000 people dying from a disease in less than one year and almost 25,000 people affected. How do you quantify that in monetary terms? Well, it is said that up to $15 billion in the next three years will be lost to trade, investment, and tourism for West Africa. But why did we have to wait until Ebola became a crisis? It could have been solved. The pharmaceutical companies actually had started developing a vaccine or treatment against Ebola and it stopped because it didn't make profit. So a few hundred people died, it didn't matter, but these were people that were totally invisible to us. They were in remote areas. They are forgotten. Let me be more specific. Ebola was able to progress unchecked for months because of lack of infrastructure, because of lack of medical facilities, because of lack of investment in earlier detection, in education, in treatment, in vaccination, and so we could not contain it. But even then, apart from the disease itself, what has it done to farmers? Farmers are unable to turn their crops. They are not even able to go to the field. And the economic situation of these three countries, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea wasn't. Now, imagine in a situation in Guinea, in 2013, women grow potatoes that are exported to Senegal. In 2013, they exported 250 tons of potatoes, Irish potatoes, as we call them. In 2014, they were only able to export 22 tons because of Ebola, from 250 tons to 22 tons. So you had a major drop of potato exports to small farmers of Guinea, mostly women, but prices in Senegal skyrocketed. But the cost did not stop in Africa. For six months, Heathrow Airport spent $9 million trying to check for Ebola. Even beyond that, the cost of rehabilitation of health workers, coming from Sierra Leone, Guinea, and Liberia, is astronomical. What this means is that if we had checked the disease itself, it would have stopped. It is still causing death today in spite of it. So basically, what we are saying is that if it costs $4.3 billion, sorry, I beg your pardon, Ireland has placed around $4.3 billion to support the fight against Ebola. But save the children has shown that the cost of dealing with Ebola outbreak will be three times the annual cost of investing in building a universal health services in all three affected countries. Building a universal health service will cost three times as much just to check Ebola. So we didn't have to do that. Was it necessary for us to wait until Ebola became a crisis? This is the question I ask in terms of development assistance. It is not enough for us to say, well, we have hit the 0.7 percent target. This is how many million dollars we contribute to overseas development assistance. The question is, when? Targeting. When do we do it? When is it most valuable for us to do it? Migration, another example. The migration, the crisis today. But would it have ever hit the headlines if, last year alone, three and a half thousand, three thousand, five hundred people had not died in the Mediterranean trying to cross. With Italy getting almost as high as 200,000 immigrants into Italy. Italy is unable to manage it. So it gets assistance from the European Commission, from the European Union. But there are other consequences of this massive migration. And we know why the migration. People are moving from rural areas into capital cities. They're running away from crisis, from civil disturbance, from political crisis, from wars and the rest of them. But what is it costing countries in Europe in particular? Development assistance is caught in some countries in order to meet the migration. We have member states who are saying to us, well, listen, Mr. President, we are unable to meet our commitments as promised because we are forced by the government to support immigrants. And so part of the money that has been allocated for sustained development is moved out for an emergency. Why do we have to wait till a crisis, till a problem becomes a crisis? Why do we have to wait until inequality becomes a disease? Inequality of opportunities, in health, in education, in political systems, all end up the same way. We spend more money managing a crisis than we would have spent preventing it from happening. Simple, what my parents used to say to me, prevention is better than cure. It applies even here. I can give you an example, the issue of nutrition, or malnutrition. Now, for years it was always considered a business, a problem, an issue that was to be dealt with the Ministry of Health. Because nutrition was a health problem. It's not a health problem. It has become a health problem. But it doesn't have to be that. We know that a child's mental, physical and mental development can be damaged forever for just the first thousand days. The sun movement is basically that. The nine months of pregnancy and the first 15 months after birth, the first two years, inadequate nutrition in the first nine months in the womb and the first two years of life. Now, there are today 160 million children under the age of five who were stunted. They will never reach their potential. And it's going to cost the world $125 billion a year because of their better nourished counterparts. $125 billion a year in lost GDP. Now, the funny part of this, or not funny, the most unfortunate part of this though, is that by investing $10 billion a year, we are able to save $125 billion. By investing $10 billion to prevent malnutrition, through better health services, through better agricultural systems so that children and pregnant mothers are fed correctly. Now, when you think about development assistance, how do we narrow the inequality gap is by attacking the issue before it becomes a crisis? As I said before, if we're actually serious about development, we should basically go where it is. We should attack poverty and hunger and poverty at its own base in rural areas. This is why my institution believes that rural transformation is going to be the key to it. Now, we have to look at it. One, as I said earlier, majority of the poor are in developing countries and they live in rural areas. The primary source of livelihood is agriculture. So agriculture productivity is going to be key in these areas. But why? It's not just for food security. Agriculture not only feeds people, it creates jobs, employment. It creates wealth. But more importantly, it ensures a cohesive community. When the community is cohesive, when there's coherence, and people feel they belong, you achieve political stability. And when your rural space is transformed and people find economic activity, they do not migrate. So we're going to end up with bulging urban areas. We're going to increase the size of city slums because people will migrate. If you want to reverse the migration, you must transform the rural areas so they become rural cities themselves. People do not migrate. When they do not migrate, you don't have the problems in Europe or in the Americas or in Australia where they always migrate depending on what part of the region they are. So you're going to mitigate migration. And when you do that, you are going to achieve political stability and global peace. So the issue of inequality is again attacking the problem before it becomes a crisis. And I don't believe that it's an issue of simply increasing the ODA to these countries. Giving more money to a government that doesn't have the right governance structures is basically supporting corruption. Increasing the ODA to a particular country does not necessarily mean you help them to develop. You only increase corruption. What happens? The elites, you have elite capture. The middle class may grow, but the poor get poorer. And that's where the problem lies. If you take the African story, you say 11 of the 20 fastest growing economies are in Africa. Fine. So Africa emerging. I attended a conference last week in Côte d'Ivoire on Africa emerging. There's a lot of hype. I agree with them. But look at the story. Where is this wealth coming from? High GDP growth, extractive industries, oil, gas, coal, copper, diamonds. So the industries are helping the rich to get richer. The middle class to grow. But the majority of the poor remain poor because this growth is not translated into economic and social development. So as we enter the post-2015 development era, the international community will have to focus on poverty eradication with an emphasis on inclusive growth that really looks at stemming the problem in the rural areas, reducing inequalities and improving resilience. For us at EFAD, the solution to inequality and poverty is quite simple. Invest in rural areas and transform small-holder agriculture into profitable rural businesses. I used to say to ministers when I visit that agriculture itself is a very lucrative business and farmers and livestock producers are actually entrepreneurs. The problem is that their agriculture business is a failure. But why is it a failure? Farmers, poor people in rural areas, please let's change our mindset. They are not waiting for government handouts. That I know, whether you're talking about the mountains of Nicaragua or the Tigray region of Ethiopia or wherever it is, they are looking for economic opportunities to be able to sell their business, to make their businesses grow. Whether it's from one cow to ten cows in five years, whether it's from expanding their agricultural land from one acre to ten acres, they want to grow. But it doesn't make sense for us to give them improved seeds or a new hyfer, cattle, when they have nowhere to store the excess. Why will the farmer want to grow, increase their yields when they can't even transport it because there are no roads? The next year they're not going to grow. The first Ethiopian food crisis that occurred in the 80s, one region of Ethiopia received plenty of rainfall. The other did not for two years running. So while there was famine in one part of Ethiopia, the other did not experience it simply because there was food in the country but it could not be transported, infrastructure. And as I said, investing in rural women is going to be key. In Africa, in Latin America, in South Asia, women are key to the agricultural systems. And we know that when you invest in a rural woman, you invest in the community. When you invest in a rural man, you invest in an individual because the rural woman does not only take care of the domestic gardens, the gardens, the backyard gardens and make sure the children are well fed and they go to school, she also knows how to manage resources better. So we emphasize that if investing in rural women is going to be key to achieve rural transformation. And we also know that the needs of farmers in developing countries are not any different from the needs of farmers here in Ireland. They need access to inputs, financial services, they need paved roads to get their goods to market, they need processing and safe storage facilities for what they don't sell so that they can store it until the next market season. They also need training in livestock, crop management, they need access to financial services, rural financial services, secure land tenure as well as political voice. But these they can achieve when they are empowered. And subsistence agriculture is an agricultural system that has failed. It's nothing to romanticize about it. And we are talking about a system that can achieve its potential if the access to all of these things is possible. It's as simple as that. And we have seen it. The ministers saw it happen. They saw it in Ethiopia last week. I've seen it in Nicaragua, in Guatemala, in Rwanda, in Ghana. You name it. Even in China, in Vietnam, all over the world is the same process. Provide the opportunities and these communities can thrive. What it means is that they have to own it. Again, it is not enough for us to say, we'll increase our development assistance, but it's exactly what do they use it for. And so agriculture, as I said, is too often overlooked by donors and national governments alike. Every country in Africa and elsewhere needs policies that offer incentives. And this is where political leadership is important. The political leadership must set the tone, not just in words, but in action. That is as much as people talk about Kagame of Rwanda or Meles, for my Meles of Ethiopia. I say, tell me which are the two countries in Africa where there is change. Well, you can say, well, maybe we should have development before democracy. Or maybe we should have democracy before development. But I can tell you, my 40 years professional life, I've never seen development follow after democracy. I've seen it happen the other way around. What does that tell us? So let me conclude, I've had to skip a lot of, I think we have some time for question and answers. But I think in my 40 years and my work at IFAD have now come to three, I could say five things, but I'll stay with three things. I think we need to focus on, to reduce poverty, to improve nutrition, to narrow the gap between the rich and the poor. These are simple lessons. The first one is that development is not something we do for people. Development is something people do for themselves. You can never develop people. They must develop themselves. But what is our role for them to develop themselves? We can catalyze. We can facilitate. We can support. We can enhance. The poor people, as I said, are not waiting for handouts. They are looking for economic opportunities. At IFAD, our strategy, we start with people. People are the core of our business. They contribute to project design and they contribute to the cost of the project. Communities must contribute. We monetize their labor. For instance, to build a one-kilometer road. We monetize their labor. They provide labor and that is part of their contribution. We call it in-kind. But in our project documents, you will find IFAD contribution, Irish aid contribution, if it is co-financed by Irish aid, government contribution, beneficiaries' contribution as well. So that they take ownership. They want to see progress. They want that success to be their own success. The second is how we measure results. As I said earlier, development is not how much money we have spent or dispersed. It is how it has affected the lives and livelihoods of people. How many people are moving out of poverty? Is the household income gone from $1 to $5 or to $10? Are more girls, children, as we say, going to school than they were 10 years ago? Do they not have a clinic? Are the parents spending more money for medical services? Now that is counter-intuitive. When they don't have money, rural families never go to hospitals or clinics. When they start earning money, they begin to do that. They want to see a doctor. So actually, when rural communities begin to spend more money on medical services, it's an indicator of progress, not the reverse. And then they will demand for a clinic. Because they can determine the votes. That is also a measure of success. So it's not just the amount of money that we put into the kitty. It's actually what it does to people. So we must measure results not by just money invested or the yields alone, but by reduced poverty, improved nutrition, and healthy ecosystems. Like I used to say to my colleagues in Africa, to be well-fed is only half of the journey. You can eat cassava three times a day. In the morning, you eat it as what we call gari. In the afternoon, you eat it as what we call eba. In the evening, you eat it as fufu. It is still cassava. It's not nutritious. I can say the same thing here in Ireland. We eat potatoes three times a day. For breakfast as hash browns, what do you call it? For lunch as chips or french fries, or for dinner as smashed potato. You are not going to grow up strong. You need something else. So they have to be able to diversify their food and to live better lives. My third lesson is that development is not a one-size-fit-all approach. And we shouldn't make the mistake. In La Tanya, does it mean it's going to work in Uganda? You must test it. We have seen too frequently how development efforts fail with their imports from outside, with decisions that are made in Washington, or they are made in Bond or in London. And Congress has told, this is what you should do. It never belongs to them. It doesn't succeed. So there may be many solutions to inequality, poverty, and hunger but each must be targeted regions of a specific region, or even a specific village. Let me leave you with one final thought. Those are my three lessons. Why should people in cities care about what happens in the countryside? Because the countryside makes the urban areas thrive. It's very simple. They depend on each other. It's what we call the urban rural nexus. We need rural areas to grow our food, to maintain a healthy ecosystem, and to contribute to the clean air and clean water that we all need. You cannot have healthy cities without healthy rural areas. So I take an issue with those who say, invest in the new urban cities, or what do you call it, the cities of the 2020s or 2025s. We also need rural cities. Rural economies must thrive, because of the flow of goods and services and money between rural and urban areas. Without this, migration will continue to happen, from the rural areas to the urban areas, and then out of the continents. So let's not forget about rural people, otherwise we'll bear the cost of inaction. And the cost of inaction is much more expensive than the cost of action when a problem is still a problem, not a crisis. I believe that the post-2015 agenda will not achieve its goal if we only talk about sustainable urban areas without focusing on the rural areas, which provide us with vital economic and social stabilities. Cities in themselves have a finite capacity. They cannot produce all the good jobs that we need. Cities have a finite capacity, but the rural areas are yet to be exploited. When somebody tells me that African agriculture is subsistence agriculture, I say, no, African agriculture is not subsistence. It's an agricultural system that has failed. Because current agricultural systems in Africa are only performing at 40% their potential. Forget about the 60% of all agricultural land that is in Africa that is yet to be tapped. Live that, I say, that is Africa's strategic land reserve. Increase the productivity of existing systems from 40 to 60 to 80. Africa will feed itself and feed the world, but it takes political leadership to bring about that change and good governance. Thank you.