 My name's Ian Scoones. I'm based at the Institute of Development Studies and coordinator of the Future Agriculture Consortium and one of my other roles is to be a science advisor to ILRI which is an exciting job I took on last year. We've just finished an important conference on the future of pastoralism in Africa and indeed this is one of the areas that ILRI or in its predecessors ILCA was a major leader of in the past particularly in the 1980s and 1990s. At some extent it's slightly dropped off the the research agenda and one that I think is a gap in ILRI's research portfolio currently. This is if we're talking about livestock and livestock as a driver of economic growth and poverty reduction and the creator of livelihoods. Pastoralism must be part of ILRI's research agenda into the future and I think one of the things that has emerged out of this conference is that the technical, economic and other expertise that ILRI has and indeed the history of ILRI research can be an enormous contributor to that. A number of things were raised. The production of production issues in pastoral areas was a major concern of livestock animal scientists and range ecologists in the past but again the the research in this area somewhat dropped off but there's an enormous need if this economic growth is to be sustained and it is substantial places like Ethiopia with very very significant exports cross-border formal and informal a big driver of economic growth. If this is to be sustained technical research at that production end needs to be sustained but it needs to be focused on pastoral areas pastoral production systems and the conditions that that are that arise which are different to livestock production systems in humid or subhumid areas. The other area that I think emerged in the conference which I think ILRI could engage with very productively is the idea the broader idea of innovation and technical innovation. What we see in pastoral systems as they're adapting to challenges of climate change market dynamics and so on is an enormous process of innovation and adaptation by pastoralists themselves. We had a whole session yesterday on pastoral innovation systems where people are adapting to new market systems camel milk marketing from the remotest corners of Somali region here in Ethiopia being exported within the day across the to the Arabian Peninsula extraordinary export trade with value addition to the pastoral economy. This is being done currently without any external support. I don't know the exact details of ILRI's research portfolio I would guess that there isn't much research on camels and probably no research on camel milk production. I stand to be corrected of course as science advisor but that would be my guess it hasn't been the case in the past I suspect it hasn't the case here but here's an opportunity for interesting work from from areas of food safety through to milk processing to marketing to value chain addition where ILRI and its scientists could have enormous impact so I think there's a great opportunity for ILRI scientists to engage with innovators outside the formal scientific research system who are pastoralists themselves we often have this idea of the CG being the upstream research part of the research system passing down its technical innovations downstream that's important for some areas I don't deny that that's a pattern of innovation that's been significant but actually to engage for scientists to engage downstream with innovations and innovation processes that are going on on the ground would be an important addition to the portfolio of research within the Institute as it moves forward.