 Given Godfrey, the chair of the IRI, the director general of IRI, my colleagues from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, ladies and gentlemen. First of all, let me thank you so much for inviting us to be here today for this important subject, which is the innovation in the rice sector. I wanted to use the time to maybe zoom in to a certain extent on the vital role of innovation, how innovation can help smallholder farmers to feed the world. Smallholder farmers produce more than 70 percent of the food calorie for people living in Asia and 80 percent for people living in sub-Saharan Africa. At a time where the world population is increasing by 83 million people a year, the importance of smallholders can only grow. If we want a world in which extreme poverty and hunger are eliminated, and that is the aim of the Sustainable Development Goals, particularly Goal 1 and 2. So if we want that to achieve those goals, then we need to invest in a rural transformation that is inclusive and sustainable. Rates of extreme hunger are no longer declining, and in many areas where we are working, climate change is putting additional pressure on the production, like all of us smallholders face a world that is rapidly changing. They need to simultaneously adapt to climate change and obviously increase their output. Smallholder farmers must be at the heart of an emerging agricultural innovation ecosystem. I'm borrowing the term innovation ecosystem from the technology industry. It does refer to the range of actors from scientists and academics to financiers to small business and industries who must collaborate and contribute as part of a broader system in order to turn new ideas into better ways of doing business. Science will of course be an essential part of this wide-ranging adaptation to a changing world. For centuries, farmers have faced diverse risks that they have needed to manage, including unpredictable price, droughts, floods, pests, and diseases. But climate change is now magnifying these risks. The impact of smallholders, farmers, who often have resources with which to cope. Those few resources that they have to cope with could be severe unless they are enabled to adapt. In the years ahead, the women and men, and especially the youth, will need many kinds of innovation from new cultivation practices to new source of financing. This is essential to double agricultural productivity and smallholders' income by 2030, according to the target 2.3 of the sustainable development goals. Farmers can contribute as well as benefit from innovation. Farmers have traditionally sought new ways to make their plots more productive and more profitable. And ultimately, it is farmers who decide whether an innovation developed in the lab or on the laptop, whether this innovation is adopted on their own land. One of the things that IFAD and its partners will do is to analyze the problems faced by rural communities and making sure that the starting point is the will and the expectation of the communities themselves. We look at all the aspects of the value chain that could be improved and then search for innovative ideas that can solve those challenges. We do that by inviting, involving all the stakeholders with smallholders playing the central key role, creating a rural innovation ecosystem that works well, let's recognize it. It is difficult because every locality has a different set of challenges. Just an example, in a project that we have in Indonesia, we successfully, which is quite successful in combining many sort of innovative ideas. The smallholder livelihood development program in eastern Indonesia is being implemented by the full security agency under the Ministry of Agriculture with the objective to increase the income and the full security. Then a preliminary study in eastern Maluku and the north part of the province found that diet in that part lacked energy, macronutrients, and protein. So one solution to the micronutrient problem was to introduce a local food system that is scientific innovation, bio-45 orange fleshed sweet potato, which is quite very high in vitamin A. So local protein consumption is largely from fish in this part of Indonesia. But prices are high and supplies quite erratic. In fish production alone, we identify scope for three sort of innovation. First is switch to environmentally friendly fishing techniques. Second improved technology, better boats to enable fishers to range further in search of fish. And finally innovation in storage and transportation to reduce the food loss by introducing refrigeration in the fish food system. This also improved market access for fishers and consumers because most people in more distant places could afford cheaper fish. So a single project brought together multiple kind of innovation, innovation in nutrition, dietary habits, in the crop science, fishing techniques, technology, food loss, and market access. As you can see, innovation is not just about technology. Climate change is another area that is creating a vast scope for innovative but varied solutions around the world. We are working with the global environmental facility to strengthen the environmental sustainability and the climate resilience of poor people, economic activities. The whole objective is to support farmers to adopt techniques to optimize the use of diminishing water resources. First by supporting infrastructure innovation, including the rehabilitation or the construction of mini-dumps. Secondly by adding innovation in resource and infrastructure management by better organizing the water users and the farmers organizations. Thirdly, we are also scaling up adoption of traditional techniques for making the most scarce water. By promoting the use of half moon, which has been a traditional system for water conservation and water management. This is somehow back to the future innovation because we are just expanding a technique developed by indigenous people in the arid lands of western Sahel. Farming in the 21st century also will mean connecting to rapidly modernizing value chains and meeting quality standards, accessing information technology, taking advantage of new seeds and diversifying production and coping with the effect of climate change. In West and North Africa, for example, which are plagued by erratic rainfall, frequent drought and high soil salinity, serial yields fall far below the global average of two tons per hectare. So in a joint project that in effect we had with European Union and ICARDA, about 136 improved varieties of wheat and crops have been introduced in eight countries. Those new varieties were also supplemented with training in conservation practices such as zero or minimum tillage, which contribute to improved soil fertility and water conservation. Ladies and gentlemen, successful innovation needs to grow from the ideas of all those fighting the problems that give rise to hunger and poverty no matter where they are. We need a holistic, collaborative approach to fostering entrepreneurship, building capacity and providing access to input, market, finance and basic social services. This is particularly true in the case of young people. If we want them to see a feature in rural areas, we need to employ a combination of modeling innovative ideas, innovative techniques and training. An example is what is happening in the Songhai Center in Benin in West Africa with concept integrating both agriculture, animal husbandry and fish farming with food processing and even food catering. It runs on energy from waste. It provides young women and men with the skill and inspiration they need to start rural agribusinesses. In Uganda, we have a project of inclusion, financial inclusion in rural area, which aims to bring about a million youth, women and men, into saving and credit cooperatives and community saving and credit group. Packages for youth include credit combined with financial literacy training, business development services and mobile money products. In Mali, a project designed to create alternative to migration uses a novel crowdfunding platform to attract investment from the Malian diaspora into young people's business back home. As a further step to help overcome barriers to finance, we have decided to launch a new innovative impact investment fund that will be operation early 2019, the Agribusiness Capital Fund, a BC fund. We hope that this fund will have a focus on young rural entrepreneurs and will provide a channel for our partners to direct additional finance to target groups while capitalizing on our strong relationship and our knowledge of the environment. Dear colleagues, if we are to achieve the sustainable development goals, if we are to end poverty and double the smallholder's productivity and income by 2030, we need not only to innovate, but we need our ideas to be implemented and to be scaled up. To feed the world sustainably, we need rural areas to become places where new ideas are incubated and grow. Only a new and innovative approach with smallholders at the center can deliver the rural transformation we are looking for. Thank you so much.