 by Dr. Robert S. Siegler. Most of us probably know our keynote speakers, scientific and professional CV. But I suspect that anyone who has had the opportunity to talk with Dr. Robert Siegler, especially if Bob has had a few cups of coffee on that day, comes away from the experience of chatting with him with an inkling that his brain is frightfully large. Bob Siegler's thoughts, grounded in deep expertise, and more than three decades of research experience in the developing world, span not only agriculture science and food security, but humanity and the cosmos. This might also say something about his heart. Bob is passionate about the mission. As Director General of the International Rice Research Institute, it is evident that to him, rice science for a better world means food, nutrition, and income security for the far fringes most vulnerable and least served. It is fortunate that he has devoted his intellect and his passion to our shared cause. We are fortunate that he is our keynote speaker today. Ladies and gentlemen, please kindly join me in welcoming Dr. Robert S. Siegler. Today we'll be talking about the second green revolution has begun in rice research and global food security. Thank you very much and good afternoon, everyone. Your excellency, privy counselor to the Royal Family, ladies and gentlemen, distinguished guests, friends. It's a real pleasure to be able to speak with you this afternoon. I'm going to be taken aback by Tony's remarks there, I have to say. I'm going to talk about the second green revolution that has, I believe, already begun. I'm sure you'll be convinced after I'm finished is what I'm saying is correct. I'm going to dive a bit into the science and a bit of the philosophy behind where we've come from and where we are going. I would like to remind you that I am from the International Rice Research Institute. We've been working to improve rice production, welfare of rice farmers, to ensure the sustainability of the rice production systems since 1960 and ported to the Philippines. And I'm sure you will see as we go through the conference that URI does not do this work on its own. We work together in close partnerships with our friends and colleagues around the world. And I think it's a great example of applying science to development, to demonstrate that what the dream can actually be realized. We are a member of a group of international research centers around the world that was actually built on the model of URI to address a wide range of problems facing mankind and food security. Most recently, we've come together to form a global rice science partnership that you'll hear about throughout the rest of the conference. We have joined with Africa Rice in Africa, a center focused on rice research, SEAT in South America. IRD and CIRA from Japan and in France. And CIRA in Japan to form a global rice science partnership that puts together an agenda that addresses a broad range of research topics worldwide. We have more than 900 partners in GRISC. And I think it is a phenomenal achievement to bring together the entire global rice research community. Now, despite the fantastic demonstrations and cultural presentations that we've seen here on this page, I think it's worth a few moments to reflect on what is rice. Where does it sit in the world today? First of all, it is perhaps the oldest domesticated crop at least 10,000 years ago. And it is tremendously diverse. It is perhaps the most diverse of all our domesticated crops, not the least of which because domestication, they actually continue to be going on in the fields of Asia and Africa and Latin America today. But as I'm sure you've begun to appreciate, rice is far more than just a food. It actually penetrates the societies and cultures of rice growing countries, particularly in Asia. There was an article that came out of the Science Magazine in May that did a quantitative assessment of how rice cultures are fundamentally different from those cultures that were built on other crops. But it's more than just a cultural icon for the world. It is also a staple food for well over half the world's population. So if you consider that it's a staple food, it's a cultural, central cultural precept in many societies. If there's a rice shortage, it's far more than just, I'll go have potatoes or bread instead. It's an existential crisis. And finally, keep in mind that rice flourishes in the monsoon of environment across Asia, where most of our major crops around the world would die under this kind of conditions, rice flourishes. And rice will continue to flourish for generations to come. Now where is rice consumed? If we have a look here, these are the darker colors on the map represent the greatest per capita consumption, very large amounts of rice eaten in Asia. But if you look across the globe, you can see Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, South America, all show significant rice consumption. What's particularly striking is if you overlay the distribution of poverty or extreme poverty over rice consuming areas. Each stock represents a quarter of a million people living in destitution. So to me it's clear that if we want to do anything about poverty in this world, rice will have to be a part of the equation. Now I wanna talk to you about the second green revolution but I've been first thinking about the first green revolution. We think back to the 1950s and 1960s, yields were very low, near a ton and a half per hectare across the world. If you add a fertilizer to the crop, just grew tall and fell over and yields didn't go up. And widespread families were predicted. Asia was considered to be a basket case. But with the investment in agricultural research and rice research in particular, a few visionaries in Rockefeller and Ford Foundation had identified partners in Asia that said we can create a different world, transform the rice plant and they did that. Going from the tall, lanky, traditional varieties to the semi-dwarf varieties. That when you add fertilizer, they added more grain instead of just stems and leaves. Today yields are well over four times per hectare and economists agree that the foundation of the economic miracle of Asia was built on a supply of abundant, affordable rice. And I think this is an example of science doing what people said can never be done. And the science has taken great pride in the accomplishments of that first green revolution. I call the green revolution 1.0 as the creation of the semi-dwarf varieties. There are many more iterations of that first green revolution, changes in pest and disease resistance, crop management practices, et cetera, but all form part of that first green revolution. But as we heard earlier, the demand for rice is growing and continuing to grow. By, if we look at up to 2040, we're going to need another 112 million metric tons of rice per year just to stay where we are. And if you think about the figures I cited earlier, where we are is not good enough. We have to continue to increase our rice supply to meet our projected demands. But unfortunately yield growth is dismal or slow. The low 1% per year, which means if we stay on today's trajectory, we will not be able to meet tomorrow's demands for rice. So it's imperative that we renew our investments and efforts to improve rice productively. And it's not just demand that challenges us, I think there's no question, the climate change is already affecting our situations. Temperatures, rainfall pattern, sea level rise are all, we have increases of the porous, and of course the threats of increased severity of tropical storms. All of which will hit rice producing areas, especially hard ones. So we will have to meet tomorrow's demands, facing changing climate that is in demand. And where's our world's rice going to come from? I think there's no question that the preferred answer is it will come from existing land and we will increase the output from those lands. And that's supposed to be an agent. 20 years from now we hope that Africa will enter into a major source of supply for the world, but over the next couple of decades, Asia is going to have to step up its proactivity. But we consider what's happening in Asia, we have land is moving out of rice, labor is moving out of rice, water being hydrated for other uses. So we're going to have to produce much more rice on the same amount of land with less land, with less inputs, and better use of labor. Major challenge facing us. And those major challenges are just to stay where we are, and I'm telling you that is not good enough. And I want to remind you that if Asia is not sufficient in rice, the world itself is food insecurity. So I think it's clear that to meet tomorrow's demands and address the challenges of food insecurity, poverty, the second green revolution is needed and I maintain it is a green revolution that will have to be firmly rooted in science. And when I talk about a second green revolution that is science based, what do I mean by that? We are in the midst of a tremendous revolution in science, genetics, molecular biology, plant physiology, all of which completely open the doors for many new innovations, allowing us to tackle problems that we did not think we could address before. We also could link what is happening in the soil, in the rice paddy, in the waters, to better understand and manipulate how our rice plant is nourished, and do so in a sustainable way that does not contaminate ground waters or surface waters where business games are late. We have an unprecedented growth in computational capacity, communications capacity, the ability to amass and analyze and manipulate enormous data sets, the kinds of data sets that are created by the earlier two revolutions. And through our communications, we can have teams distributed around the world working together in real time. We can address questions at a level of complexity that were previously on a dream goal. And I think most importantly, the scientific community is recognizing that unless we engage our policy makers, our decision makers, and yes, our politicians, we're not going to be able to have the fruits of our revolutions move to the rice fields and benefit rice farmers and consumers. So let's talk a little bit about the science. Well, the first thing you cannot overestimate, my opinion, is the potential contribution of genetic resources. At Erie Goho, 120,000 of accessions of rice varieties. Imagine that diversity developed over thousands of years of rice farming. But a very tiny amount has been used in our breeding programs. But as was mentioned earlier this afternoon, we have just completed the sequencing of 3,000 members of that collection. We sequenced 3,000 rice chinos. When I became director general of Erie, there was a front page story that we had sequenced one genome. Today, we've sequenced 3,000 in a period of months and it's a routine of the terms. And from that genetic platform, we have with our partners designed a flow to systematically identify the useful traits in those genetic resources and translate them into useful varieties. Addressing pest diseases, biotic and biotic stresses. This opening up of the rice gene bank will in fact enable the second green revolution to take place. When we look at the 3,000 lines in a sequence, for that to be useful, we have to understand how to perform. How does it perform? How does that performance relate to the genetic sequence? And so we are looking at the development of a systematic approach to generate a real return on those 3,000 genomes. It is the broadest collection of information of any organ in the world, far underway. And I want to emphasize that we are under oppression to create new technologies. But money can't buy us time. But what money can do is put time on our side. The sequence in these genomes, we can make a tremendous investment in making the science and taking the science forward. Now to identify the genotypes, the genes, the alleles we have here, improve our breeding programs, we have to relate performance to sequence. And we have with our partners around the world, tremendous number of facilities that are being brought together to systematically evaluate the sequences of our license sessions. We have facilities in the field environments. We have mobile field sensors, drones, all of which we use to collect the data that will allow us to use the genetic information effectively and powerfully. And one of the challenges we have is to make rice climate ready. We know that their climate change is confronting our rice production systems. How can we deal with it effectively? If we look at where most of the rice has grown in the world, it's in the river deltas of Asia. 50% of the growth in rice production in the last 25 years came from the river delta areas. River deltas are by definition at sea level. So you can certainly expect greater problems of flood and seawater intrusion to the rice production areas in the future. And large areas of rice in Asia are prone to flooding. About 10 million hectares at least are lost to flooding every year. An even favorable area suffered short-term flooding. And our scientists over the years have identified sources of resistance in our gene bank to flooding with prolonged exposure to flooding. I took a while to move those materials into useful backgrounds. As a matter of fact, the great quality and ergonomic performance of the flood tolerant rice that we're early about were very poor. As a matter of fact, a friend from Thailand told me once that the first flood tolerant rice was so bad that his dog wouldn't eat it. Now if you're a plant breeder and someone tells you your rice is so bad that your dog wouldn't eat it, that's like a dagger to the heart. But in fact, they kept at it and were able to identify the gene from flood tolerance, move it into varieties that do great quality and high yield. And this is how they look and feel. Those that have plots with the white, names in white don't have the flood tolerant gene. Those with the names in yellow have the flood tolerant gene. And it's quite clear that the ones with the flood tolerant gene in yellow perform much better than the white ones. This was after 17 full days of complete submergence in that plot. And by any stretch of the imagination, that is a catastrophic flood event. It's also in my opinion where I won't give you too much statistics. You won't have to be a statistician to see the difference there. Well, that was a performance in Erie's field plots. In 2008, this was taken out to Eastern India and evaluated under real world flood conditions in a farmer's field. This is Mr. Ashamon Pahl, who's one of our first collaborators. And this is what his field looked like. Planned into a flood tolerant variety for two successive floods. His neighbors were laughing and saying, oh, wow, we're not gonna get anything out of that. And we talked him into, to say, now I don't know if he's gonna look at it, but it's it for a while. And that's what that same field looked like October 31st. Miraculous recovery, is how I was described by the farmers there. And that material was moving across India and South of Bangladesh and Southeast Asia very quickly. Millions of farmers have already received the material. And I, go out on a limb. I talk about the Second Green Revolution. And I said, not only has the Second Green Revolution begun, I can tell you that the Second Green Green Revolution began at 1.17 in the afternoon, July 31st, 2008, Mr. Pahl did not plow up his field. He showed the faith in the science that we could overcome a problem that had played in his ancestors for generations in total. And when we look at the impact of this technology, we had some of the world's top agricultural and non-economists come out and look at the performance of these materials in the field, do assessments of what, how they were being adopted and by whom. They published a paper among the nature of family of journals, top, top journals in the world. The title says, The Flood Tolerance Reduces Heal Very Early and Lays Its Expected Heal, Differentially Benefiting Disadvantaged Groups. When I read the last paragraph of that paper, I literally got goose bumps. My hair stood on end. And that last paragraph said in part that this study indicates that scheduled casts are likely to be a major beneficiary from the spread of swornness of one in India, The Flood Tolerance Rise. The scheduled casts are the lowest of the low, the untouchables. So this technology, this group of the most exquisite research of some of the finest laboratories in the world is differentially benefiting the poorest of the poor. Now that is a scientific revolution, I don't know what it is. That gives me great pride to be a scientist and to have been associated with the people who've done that work. And it's not just the science. It's also getting seen out. We started with 10 kilograms of seed in 2006 going to India. We have hundreds of tons, thousands of tons of seed now produced. The Indian government fully on board, state governments on board, research organizations, NGOs, and the private sector. So if you're going to move the technology, you can't just perform well, people have to buy in. Governments, private sector, NGOs, and universities. But it can be done. And it's not just the story of the past, it's the story of today. This is so oppressed, the governments of India, Bangladesh, and Nepal, that last Sunday, we, from yesterday, the day before, I went to Nepal, I sat down with the Secretary of Agriculture of India, Secretary of Agriculture of Bangladesh, the Secretary of Agriculture of Nepal, and signed an agreement that each country would recognize the variety of release processes of the other. They put national pride aside and said, if we can get the best technology out and you, our neighbors, have judged it worthy, we will accept it and move it as well. A tremendous breakthrough, politically and socially. Thinking about drought. Drought was a problem, not just floods. And we were dropping along the same lines drought tolerant materials that will give us an additional ton of rice for hectare, even in severe drought areas. And interestingly enough, and surprisingly enough, we are combining drought tolerance and flood tolerance within the same variety. Because farmers, in these environments, get hit by a drought or a flood in the same year. So they need tolerance to pose it. It would seem impossible to do that when we've done it. And I say we, because I like to take credit for everything that's worked. But our scientists around the world working together have done this. And it's not just stresses from the environment that can impose hardship on our licensed fields and farmers. My re-nutrient deficiencies in the scourge around the world. Zinc, vitamin A, iron. Terracos, terrible losses. Rice is deficient in those. Rice feeding populations tend to be deficient in these. So we're developing varieties that carry these micronutrients. The most famous of which is golden rice. That carries beta-carotene. This can deliver dieterally significant amounts of vitamin A to vitamin A deficient populations. We expect that to be coming out in a few years. It's a long road, but we're nearly there. Now just to close on the breeding aspect of the area of things. Breeding program by itself doesn't get very far. In today's world breeding programs around the world will work together. I selected this to illustrate that in Africa materials are taken from all over the world brought together and distributed out amongst national programs so that they can assess not just from within Africa, but from all over what is useful to them. Part of that global rice science partnership. And they have partnerships all around Africa for the distribution of materials. And if we look at breeding programs now, again we're not independent breeding program, but we have materials going around the world from all breeding centers. And what we have now is a continuous cloud of exchange of German rice that tells me that for the foreseeable future we'll be creating materials that surpass the dreams of the first people who started the breeding revolution. But what do we do about managing our crop? It's not all about varieties. You've seen that. We have a great variety of poorly managed and we'll never express our potential. Talking about what we need. We know that rice fields vary. Different farmers face different constraints. Different financial opportunities are limitations. But each farmer needs information that's relevant to his or her field. How can they get that information? Well, we have been working with partners around Asia for over 20 years collecting detailed crop performance data, fertilizer response, etc. and have developed very solid scientific underpinnings that will allow us to recommend what in particular farmers should apply in his or her field can they give it here for a particular variety. And they need that if they're going to make informed decisions. And we have placed that those decision making tools on some very sophisticated platforms that are accessible by the most simple technologies. Farmers with the ordinary cell phone, 2G technology can access sophisticated databases driven by we have more sophisticated crop models and get information specifically what fertilizer, what water regimes, what crop protection, what varieties to use in their fields. It's an amazing character. The technologies that were developed for entirely other purposes are now being made available to the poor rice farmers. Nobody thought they were putting together cell phone technologies and crop models and tablets that they would be used by rice farmers to make intelligent decisions about how to manage their crop. That's what's happening today. And this is being rolled out across Asia and into Sub-Saharan Africa. An amazing tool that will transform many, many different aspects of rice production. I hope extending to the availability of credit to farmers as well as crop assurance. And today, just a few days ago almost 200,000 farmers in the Philippines have started to use this technology. It's moving out, it's moving out at scale. We did a quick study to figure out how good this was for the farmers. 4,700 pesos gain for them. That's about 100 US dollars. For some, that may not seem like very much but for others, it's an awful lot of money that I was reminded of our work in Sub-Saharan Africa where we're working with the poorest of the poor women in a country called Burundi and to grow prices and new technology, similar to those I was talking about and thinking about $100 a year gain, well these are people who said that before working with us, their families were eating only once a day now that he'd twice a day. So a few hundred dollars actually for people like that is a tremendous amount. Now wrapping up, I think we need to make policy makers again, asking what we need to know to make informed decisions so that the fruits of science can benefit all of us. We need to understand how much rice is being grown, where it's being grown, what our supplies look like, what's our harvest area, where will be our harvest, what yield can we expect. And we are using a combination of remote-sensitive growth models and other data to give us those information from that information in real-time at regional scale not a field, not a district, not a county, not a township, but across areas like the they call and call for. We're leveraging new technologies remote-sensing satellite imagery GIS systems, et cetera working with private sector, public sector, using publicly launched satellites that are today providing us free imagery. Thank you.