 Good morning everybody. I'm really delighted to be able to welcome you all today to this Development Matter seminar with Alvaro Lario, President of the International Fund for Agricultural Development, GIFAT. My name is Sarah Hunt and I work in our Department of Foreign Affairs as policy director in the Development, Cooperation and Africa Division, also known as Irish Aid. And as you may know, we proudly support the IIEA's Development Matter Lecture Series. This series encourages conversations on a wide range of issues important to global development. And I'm really looking forward to hearing from President Lario in today's very timely discussion titled, Towards a Sustainable and Equitable Food Future, Reshaping Food Systems Around Small Scale Producers. Before we get into the substance of the meeting, I'm just going to go through some practical matters. So President Lario will speak to us for 15 minutes or so, followed by a short video message, and then we will have a questions and answer session with you, the audience. For those of you joining online, you'll see the Q&A function on Zoom that you can use to pose your questions. And here in the room will have a roving mic. I would just remind you all that today's presentation and Q&A are on the record and are being live streamed. And finally, everyone is welcome to join the discussion on Twitter, of course, using the at IIEA handle and Development Matters hashtag. With that explained, let me welcome you here today, President Lario, and thank you for joining us to discuss this critically important issue. As you know better than most, we are talking at a particularly difficult time from the perspective of food and nutrition security. Global communities are facing exceptional challenges in 2023, more frequent extreme weather events, conflict threatening and disrupting lives and livelihoods, and fiscal pressures creating uncertainty. All of these crises and several others have come together and have severely impacted global food and nutrition security. Ireland is of course working to respond to this as we are a long standing champion of efforts to eradicate hunger and malnutrition. And our regional development policy, a better world, recognizes the central role that agricultural and food systems will play in achieving a sustainable future. In 2021, we committed 800 million over five years to nutrition programming, and in 2022 we pledged a further 50 million to combat child wasting over three years. To be successful in our efforts to really make progress and reduce food and nutrition insecurity across the world, we need to be working as a part of a global community to affect a sustainable food systems transformation. EFAT has an extraordinarily significant role to play in this work, given its unique identity as both an IFI and a UN agency that specializes in providing support to small scale farmers and rural communities. We are very proud of our partnership with EFAT. There is strong alignment between EFAT and Ireland's priorities, our areas of intervention, and we believe that we can achieve a lot working together. President Lario, you are the right person to be talking to at this moment in time. For those of you who aren't aware, President Lario has been president now for almost exactly a year, and as many years of experience in academia, private sector, the World Bank and the UN. He received a PhD in financial economics from the Complutense University of Madrid, after completing a master of research in economics at the London Business School and a master of finance from Princeton University. President Lario, I'm very much looking forward to your comments and thank you very much for joining us today. The floor is yours. Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be with all of you today and very much especially with this sunny day. I really appreciate that many of you have chosen to be today. So that's a trade-off and I really very much appreciate it. I will be giving a short speech and showing a video. So let me perhaps come to the floor and thank you to all of those online too. Let me start by thanking the International Institute and for European Affairs for their kind invitation to participate in this Development Matters lecture series. And it's also a great pleasure to be here in Dublin and Ireland as one of the IFAC founding members has been a valued partner for us over the last 45 years. And it's not surprising given their commitment to ending poverty and hunger and we're very much aligned in many of the themes which we work and investing on and in with small people and with small scale producers. Before setting the scene for today's discussion, let us take a moment to hear from the small scale producers themselves as they talk about the challenges they are facing so if we can briefly show the video to set the context. Thank you. The frequency of droughts, floods and other extreme climate events in East and Southern Africa has increased over the last four decades. Smallholder farmers and poor rural people bear the brunt as the rains are unreliable. Like now we are going to the end of October and there is no rain and so people are getting hungry because there is no water. This has been caused by deforestation, land degradation and growing water demand causing biodiversity loss and loss of livelihoods. Availability and access to water is central to livelihoods and sustainable development. It's become increasingly evident even as climate changes and the impacts of climate change impact our food systems that the need to invest in nature-based solutions is conveniently overdue. Nature-based solutions are interventions, actions and policies that enhance the protection, restoration and management of ecosystems while contributing to climate adaptation, mitigation and resilience as well as social economic benefits. Small-scale farmers who are the major food producers of the region are highly dependent on natural capital and by that I mean land on water or soil facility just to produce food for growing urban settings. Farmers and rural communities are adapting these technologies because they address their needs at the farm level. Francis Njerogge, a young entrepreneur, has installed a waterpan to help him care for his tree seedlings in his nursery which he sells to farmers and the rural community in his area. Gerald Juma and Tabitha Wangoy have installed biogas for use in their home. This has reduced the amount of firewood they use and has freed more time for Tabitha Wangoy to spend in the market selling her produce. Utilization of natural resources in the form of underground water and solar energy has contributed in enhancing access to water. Xiaomi is one of the 65 households in her community with tap water from a community borehole powered by solar. All of these help farmers adapt to the changing climate while improving productivity without damaging the environment. This knowledge really helps me a lot because I see people around, they have shambas but they don't make use of them and they are getting hungry and they should not be getting hungry because they have their shambas. It's very important through the different facilities that we have in place, the different co-financing arrangements that we have with the EFAT finance programs to develop financial solutions for just rural transition that most of the African countries are now very much in need of. Well, many times I think images and videos can showcase much more than any of the words that we can have here and we can see that there are solutions out there. These solutions many times require access to finance, access to land, access to technology, access to water, access to inputs. So the solutions are there and now it's a matter of investments. And for us the key issue is actually how to support many of these communities in transition from subsistence farming to really commercially viable farming where many of them can generate a certain income. And this income many times really translates into a better future for children in terms of schooling, also translates into a better nutrition and many times changes the entire communities and the nutrition component of these communities. We know the figures that are out there, I'm not going to repeat it once more, we know that there's more than 700 million people facing hunger, 3 billion people who cannot afford healthy diets. This is well known. However, we keep seeing that the food systems are still failing us and we see that the investments are not coming where they should be coming. When we talk about food systems, we're talking about how food is produced but also how food is distributed, how food is commercialized, how food is stored, how food is transported, how food is commercialized. So there's many components actually to food and a lot of the jobs that are created in these rural areas are not only on farm jobs but also off farm jobs. And the potential is huge. We know that, for example, only in Africa every year there's more than 10 million young women and men who are coming to the market and less than 4 million new jobs available. So the gap and the needs are really massive. At the same time there's also a huge connection with climate change. We know that part of the greenhouse emissions is also coming from agriculture and very much from bigger farms and that's also something that we need to take into consideration. The more I speak to many of the leaders around the world, the more I'm seeing the focus on food sovereignty, the focus on not being vulnerable to the local value chains, and they need very much to invest in food security. And I think the link between food security, food systems, agriculture, as well as climate change is getting stronger and stronger. Let us perhaps now reflect a little bit on some of the challenges and the key facts out there with the relationship of poverty, food security and food systems. We know first that most of the world's angry people live in the rural areas of developing countries so actually poverty and food security relates more than 80% to rural areas. Second, most depend on small scale agriculture. We know that for example in Asia and in Africa more than 70% of the products and of the food that they consume are being produced by small scale farmers. And we know also third that more than 3 billion rural people rely on small farms for their food. At the same time we are seeing and especially throughout the crisis that many of these small farmers are also the ones that are actually going hungry, which is also an additional challenge that we have. At the same time the reality throughout the world and as I said many times these food systems are not serving the people who are producing the food is that we are also seeing escalating conflict and many times we don't know whether actually hunger is driving the conflict or conflict is driving increased hunger. We are also seeing forced migration and in many of these rural areas, little opportunities to choose from many times the alternative is really getting fast cash being the illegal extra mining industry. Other times is joining terrorist groups in certain areas of the world. So, many of the families which go hungry have to decide between very very challenging options. So how did we come up and it in this situation not only ending but not changing it much over the last two, three decades. The reality is that the figures have been coming down in terms of poverty, not for the last three, four years as you all of you know, we have come back to the 2015 figures when we set up the SDGs. So actually in the middle road to 2030 we have come back to the same figures. At the same time the reality of how we ended up here has been not the crisis of Ukraine, not a specific I would say shock, not only climate change but actually under investments when we're talking about food system transformation. We're talking about 300 to 400 billion of needed investment. For a long time, food systems have been under investment. And I always put this example but it was shocking to me during the crisis after when we had COVID and also during the Ukraine war, the response of the G7 to this was a 5 billion investment. So clearly this is not enough and this will not transform food systems. So how does how do for example small scale farmers feeding to this will agricultural research has tended also to neglect small scale farmers and how markets do not really work for them. As mentioned by Oxfam has estimated that small farmers receive only 6.5 cents out of every dollar of value that the food they produce and we know that many times this is not enough for them to lead decent life. So this is also something that also puts the focus on what do they get many of the small farmers out of the value chains. When we talk about global climate finance we also know that a small scale farmers receive less than 2% of the overall climate finance and we know how they are the ones who are very much impacted. The question I received in some parliaments many times is why should we care about farmers beyond our borders and this is a fair question in terms of tax value and tax payer's money. So first of all we know that and this is very clear especially after the the covid crisis and also the the Ukraine war that we are very much all connected and we are seeing climate extreme where events having repercussions all over the world. The environmental impact in terms of land or water usage is not limited to one individual field or one region. And small scale farmers we know that in order to avoid a lot of the consequences and increase humanitarian assistance over time which is what has happened over the last decades. They need to be fairly and decently compensated for the work they do. In the case of small farms why are they important. Well, first of all they produce food for people many times sometimes is forced to sustain the families other times to get some increased income and small farms of two acres or below produce around one third of the world's food in less than 11% of the farm land. So this provides you already a big, I would say picture of of how important they are for the entire world. We also know that in terms of efficiency they are much lighter in terms of their footprint on essential ecosystems, as well as, as I was mentioning before the impact in terms of greenhouse also emissions and I we all can agree that they also preserve biodiversity in a very different way than bigger farms. And many times we are seeing it where it's with indigenous peoples or other communities they very much work with with nature. Now we talked in the developed world of regenerative agriculture but I'm sure when we explain it to many of them they have been conscious and really knowing about it for centuries. At the same time, we know that I was talking before us farming as a business and many times on seeing the generation of income. So we know that productive and profitable small farms work hand in hand with what we call micro and small medium enterprises and agri-food micro and small medium enterprises provide farmers with vital inputs where seeds fertilizers and as I was saying before also generating income for the community and they also perform activities of the farm, such as processing, storing or marketing food. I was before advocating on the importance of what has been happening on the global community on the under investment in small scale agriculture but food systems go beyond also agriculture. We know that as long as rural roads are unpaved, as long as villages are without electricity, health clinics or clean water, the food systems will continue to fail us and to fail the people that are being producing this food. We'll continue seeing young rural people migrating first to the cities where many times they cannot receive a decent employment or going across neighboring countries or in other cases to other continents. So this is the reality and this is what we have been seeing for decades, unless we change the current investments, whether it's the balance between the humanitarian and development or we attract more private sector into these rural areas. Like I'm sure I will come back in five years and I will just say the same things which will be very unfortunate. So our biggest I would say message is that we need to invest very much in these rural areas, we need to provide these small farmers with the ability to lead their lives to have this initial investment to strengthen their resilience. And we know that this is much less costly that many times being having to respond to an emergency, I think that we can all agree. There's also research that says that for every dollar that we spend in this type of resilience building, it can save up to $10 in future emergency and humanitarian costs so their return investment the value for money is very clear. Obviously need to continue saving lives and emergency relief. But without this longer investment resilience it will just the bill will continue just to increasing, especially with climate change and for that we're all affected I don't need to tell you about the droughts the floods I mean it's happening in the developing countries but also in all of the developed economies, there could be more fiscal space and ability for governments to support the citizens. At the same time this is affecting us all, just like the food crisis I think, unfortunately, if and the mission receives much more attention when there's a few crisis, when a lot of the citizens and parlor and just all of us in the developed world see that the food prices are increasing and we're all being affected, and we just think why where's this food coming from where's the value change what's happening. But for for many of the small scale farmers this is their, their day to day. We have obviously some tools and some solutions. A lot of them also are related to digital technologies where it's just a simple mobile phone, many times to access markets to access prices. Satellites in other cases drones if the development journey allows but their solutions exactly the same as with financial services I think financial inclusion the ability to have savings to be able to contract. Many times with the supply chain is something that we have seen that very much connects farmers to the markets. This is already happening the same as with we are seeing with renewable energy and PV panels, which have become very much cheaper and can be installed locally. As I said this is not only a job for the government it's a job for, I would say for all of us but also for the private sector and I think being able to attract and mobilize with the right risk return as well as with the right ecosystem and regulation to the private sector will become more key. When we talk about official development assistance is a very very tiny drop of all the investment if you seek only about remittances remittances are three to four times bigger, just in terms of ODA if you think about local private sector, it's many many many times bigger than ODA. So it's important that we are aware we don't only talk to ourselves, but actually make sure that we're partnering with many of these institutions, and many of this partners. Let me put you some examples for example of how EFAT partners before finalizing. In Rwanda, for example, with we have a partner with tea private factories where we buy which buy directly from farmer cooperatives and cooperatives themselves participate as equity shareholders in the factory. And each cooperative has around 4000 members. Indeed it has been so successful I remember when I was in Rwanda that because they also receive dividends, people want to just pay as much as they can to get into the equity, because then they receive some dividends and here we're talking about small scale farmers and smaller families but it has been a business model that has worked quite well. Or for example in Nicaragua where we have been promoting planting trees to shade coffee and cocoa crops and these schemes have sequestered carbon reduce temperature and enhance the land productivity of many of the farmer. Or in Niger where we have helped design a program that encourages farmers to plant grasses and trees, restore watersheds and conserve soil and water. This project has actually produced an increase in yields. In the case of the onions, cabbages or tomatoes of up to 40% and rave or in the case of rain fed millet 78%. So I think this has also when the right I would say integration of climate and food security comes together there's also ways of increasing productivity in the medium term, which I think there's no other choice I mean if we deplete the natural resources there's for many of them without healthy soil without access to water there's actually no agriculture, no generation of income. So just, I wanted just to end perhaps by reiterating that for us Moscow family farms it's not only about individual projects, it's about building the ecosystems and building the food systems around them. This is challenging development it's not a one of intervention it takes time. It takes us a year to design a program it takes us five to six years to implement. And our goal is that this transforms the community over time that it's sustainable when we leave the communities able to generate the income, which is one of the variables that we very much look into. With this, let me finalize thank you very much for the invitation thank you for being together today and I'm very much looking forward to the discussion thank you. Thank you very much President Larry for that insightful intervention. We have a number of questions to pose. But can I ask those who are posing questions to please identify themselves before they make the question. I know we have a roving mic here in the room. Let's start in here. Anyone like to close the question might take two or three together. Hello Don, I remember the Joe public. And I heard your talk there and you said that there was 700 million people hungry. 3 billion people that are below the food systems line nutrition line, and the rest of us are doing well and okay thank you very much. There are two hectares per small farmer, which will give one third of the annual food provision using 11% of farmland. Now, United Nations have told us that by 2050, the population of the globe is going to double. You seem to be walking yourselves into a James love lock situation, whereby he states by 2050, there'll be 1 billion people left on the earth. I want to know what plan you have to make sure that that one third of the two hectares that everybody is using. When are they going to get four hectares to give 33% of the world food population so that they might be subsidized. And while the rest of us might have to have half the food. Thank you very much. I will still survive. Michael, thank you for the question. Michael O'Brien from Trocra. Thank you for your introductory comments and I'd like to ask you about the enabling of the food systems transition and the need to both reorient and find additional mobilized additional investment for these sustainable food systems transitions. And in that context, you mentioned the private sector. And so, in terms of the private sectors co financing of transformative food systems, based on innovative approaches, such as those based on agro ecological principles. EFAD's 2021 stock take off how EFAD is supporting switch innovative transitions found negligible finance coming from the private sector. So my question is two years on from that stock take. Do you see any change. And is there are what is the role of the private sector in complimenting the critical public finance that is increasingly supporting the scaling up off switch transitions. Thank you. You want to take those two. Yes, yes, of course. Thank you very much. Thank you for the questions. Very interesting. Actually, I mean by 2050 year we're expecting to get to 10 billion so 2 billion more of population probably from the current 8 billion. The reality is that the issue of hunger and food security is not a matter of food product mapping we know how to very much produce food in the developed world developing world, I think it's, there's plenty of arable land as we all know in Africa it's a I think of the investments and the enabling of access many times to we're talking about the first time foremost I would say mechanization and productivity but also rural roads. I mean when we talk about access to markets of many of these small farmers. I was recently in the south of Madagascar and we can talk theoretically about access to markets, it's one of our focuses. Actually, there's no main road, it's only an unpaid road where actually it's very difficult for them to say well we're going to sell even send our products to the center of the country there's actually no roads the EU is actually supporting on constructing an unpaid road but it goes beyond that the same with storage. We know for example in the 2008 crisis, the international community decided to increase production massively to subsidize seats, seems like a good theoretical idea. Next year a lot of that food went rotten, because there was no storage, no distribution, no transportation. And without this enabling I would say investments around there, and we will not be able to, to really make that happen, and it's not only the international community as many of you might be aware there's the Maputo declaration from African countries where they said they wouldn't be investing up to 10% of their GDP of agriculture in agriculture, there's only one country who has really gotten close to that. And if you think about them 50, 60, 70% of their population is in formal or informal roles in agricultural food system. So I think it's the scale of the challenge is huge. And if we only put patches here and there or we do not look at the compact as such of the sectors that we need to involve it will not change and it's not about only producing more food in the field of work is making the enabling conditions in the developing world in the low income countries to be self sufficient to be even just that it's not happening in many of the countries right now. I think the scale of the, of the problem many times is the type of investments, as well as we have to recognize what we're talking about the food system stock taker right now. And there's a massive distortion from the developed world to in terms of taxes and subsidies, we were talking to the extent of 500 to 600 billion per year in terms of subsidies and taxation so we are all part of that so that's also a reality. We have to acknowledge it and it's, it should be part of the discussion in transforming all of this so there's I would say systemic issues that need to be transformed related to how to relate to each other, as well as the type of investments we do. My only main point would be that it goes also beyond food production or productivity there has been a lot of research a lot of focus on productivity which is great, but productivity which is an important part will not solve all of the entire challenge in my view. On the second question on additional instruments on co financing any change. It's interesting because I see a lot of, and I was discussing it with our colleagues now from Irish aid before I see a lot of talk about bringing the private sector. And indeed we're working with some pension funds, where they are thinking about investing one billion which is not huge but for them it's an important part of their assets and their management to try to tackle some of these issues rated to food systems and how we can support them in their technical assistance and relationship with their government. But there's always this talk about well there's trillions in the world anything could be the director. I think that's wishful thinking that's not the reality of how the world work how the pension fund work, how the private sector work so you need to offer really certain ecosystems as well as the ability for them to generate certain income to attract the private sector and be able to make sure that across the value chain you have very clear ideas of where when can they come in or you want you set up the ecosystem the regulations for them to come in. It's not necessarily happening I mean we talk about it but for us it's, and from our side is how we can really enable and catalyze a lot of that investment, not from a theoretical point of view but actually with investable assets, and with making sure, in our case and from the mission of our institution that this translates into an impact into the vulnerable community so that means into the rural people because you can bring a lot of private sector. And, as we know, and it happens in agriculture a lot of that can be extracted, just, for example through raw materials, and a lot of it can be then commercialize and transform in the developed world. A lot of African countries for example are discussing more and more about what they can do not obviously only in agriculture in other sectors to make sure that a lot of the still the transformation and the value addition is in the country, if you think about Africa once more. They import every year 75 billion in terms of food. I'm pretty sure if all of that investment would be kept in Africa, in terms of transformation commercialization, imagine the number of jobs that could be created and generation of income it could be massive. But that's part of a bigger picture that that also requires to think about food sovereignty and local production and the entire ecosystem. And that's where you can think okay where and how can the private sector coming. So it's at the end of the day it's about the entire system but making sure that you attract the private sector with specific investable assets that they can be interested in just talking about it will not bring the money so I think there needs to be a very conscious effort on those policies. And we've had a couple of questions in online so I might share them now as well. I'm killing us 11 who's the development researcher here at the IA asks, how does he fad ensure its work and programs are gender responsive. And then another question from Leanne Digny also UN researcher here at the IA asking about 2023 is the midway point of the agenda 2030. So what are your hopes for where the world will be in 2030. What is the end of a sustainable development agenda in terms of food and nutrition security. Well in terms of gender, we have targets for our programs. I would say there's an I always mentioned it but it's very important it's very different to talk about gender sensitive programs and to talk about gender transformative is about including women in the program which is part of it, but that's clearly not enough some of our impact assessment when we measure the results of our programs on the ground, actually show that we have been very effective in terms of increasing the income of many of these women in the programs and for the community which then has a transformation as I said before, in terms of nutrition in terms of schooling in terms of the family itself what we have not been effective. And we have not been and this is where the gender transformation comes and it's much more difficult it entails social norms culture is actually on for example having women access land and land titles. This provides them with the many times with the collateral with the ability of, of making, I would say, of having a sustainable future. And that's much more difficult and that transformation does not happen as easily because it entails many more conversations a lot of discussions in the communities. And that's much, much tougher. And, and probably as, as, as we know that requires a longer term also view of, of the impact many times of the programs and there's, you need patient to be patient patient capital as well as have specific to address those areas in, in terms of gender, it's very clear that that's our goal but it's also clear that it requires a long time, and it requires being very conscious so I would say gender remains one of our key features with the challenges that that it entails. Just to put you on example recently I was in, in, in giving an award to an African woman who had started a business and who was hiring other women and showing other women in the community how to become an entrepreneur and she actually told me on the side well actually all of this is great. She was receiving awards here and there, but she told me if my husband divorces me, then actually the land belongs to him. So then I have no generation of income. So I'm totally vulnerable to that land title. And that's also a reality of what we are currently talking about. In terms of the 2030 agenda well for SDG one and SDG two. The figures are back to eight years ago. So very clearly we are not only on track we are just going the opposite direction. So I cannot be very optimistic from now to 2030. In terms of SDG two concretely and for us SDG 2.3 which is relates to small scale producers. I would say that there has been a much more awareness of the importance as I was saying before of food sovereignty and the importance of local production. We're seeing some countries increasing their budgets and local governments. However, once more, the scale and the speed at which we need these changes massive and that I'm not saying. Back out to the floor. Any questions. We shall. Thank you. My name is Michelle Winthrop. I'm the Irish ambassador to South Korea and full disclosure. I'm also a member of the executive board of evad representing Ireland and with the war in Ukraine. I have a slightly lost sight of the impact that COVID-19 had on global food systems. I wonder if you could say a little bit about how that looks from your perspective and the extent to which systems have recovered from from the impact of COVID. And what you've had has been doing to address it. Thank you. Hi, good afternoon. I'm Greta Fitzgerald for food security nutrition policy and advocacy advisor with concern. It's really interesting to hear. And I suppose we've been hearing it since around the stock take in 2021 around linking kind of climate finance and food systems finance and I thought how you've kind of kind of taken the lead on the global food financing architecture that initiative. But recently Oxfam's report on climate finance and kind of digging into the numbers. It was kind of surprising not surprising, but I suppose alarming to see that about in 2019 of the 66 billion of climate finance. 26% of that was grant. The rest then was mixed between concessional non concessional loans. So, considering like just transition, rural just transition which you mentioned earlier. Realistically, where are we at with that what is the appetite to start shifting those numbers to more kind of equitable equitable proportions. And is there appetite for that I think in the discussions going on. Thanks, Gratia. There are another two more questions over here I think, and then we'll pass back. I have a macro economic question for you. You mentioned local food production food sovereignty and food imports. Now a lot of countries are in Africa are particularly reliant on imported cheap food, particularly rice to feed the urban poor. Now, this obviously sends a very negative price signal to farmers. It's very difficult to increase rice production for example in West Africa, because local farms can't compete with imported rice so if you build your local rice industry you need to have higher prices, higher prices will then mean to be honest food rights in the city so how do national governments square this particularly difficult circle. There's one more of it. Thank you very much. I would very much identify with that point you made out infrastructure. When I was growing up back in Ghana, the headlines every so often we say food routine in the farms. And so it's not a question of the food production, not taking place but getting the food from one place to another. Now, I think the popular saying is that everything comes from the land or to some extent you know the sea as well. And during your talk you made a reference to the digital elements. Now, recently I came across a book by Joan Baxter she had lived in seven countries in West Africa for 30 years and traveled to 26 others and I her book is such a revelation, but on the topic of food and digital. And she wrote about this mineral called rutail. Some of us probably are aware or not, but it is an element which as she says is present in practically everything in our household. At the same time, the mining of rutail in Sierra Leone, as she documented it has resulted in 180,000 acres of what was driving agricultural land lost. Also, she wrote about the production of agrofuel for European at the market. So, the question is that we've got the dilemma of depending upon the mineral, our everyday use, which is also resulting in for example, the loss of farmland. If I can also make a quick comment about the Ukraine situation. Now, everybody is saying, oh, like the war is going to affect food importing Ghana. Now, sorry, Africa, for example. Now, okay, while I okay, probably should be grateful that people are taking a force is same sometime in the summer that like your farming, your neighboring farmer is being killed. And we are worrying about our food source. We kind of, you know, as a first, secondly to, I mean, why should a tropical land depend upon grains from the template lands. People have been studying the history of food production in Africa would know that there are drought resistant crops such as millet, so go and this were replaced by the colonial authorities with things like maze. And I mean, fortunately, there are there are efforts to bring them back. Anyway, I mean, because of shortage of time. My question is that. What can we do to resolve that difficulty of farmlands being lost, because we are depending upon those minerals for our everyday living. I think I'll leave it there. Thank you. Isabel from the Irish League credit unions foundation. I just a kind of an adjunct question comment. Is there any engagement or policy dialogue with the World Trade Organization to address the structural issues which you've alluded to and I was relating also to Paul Wagstaff questions as well. Thank you. Thank you very much. A lot of very interesting and structural questions. Let me start with the last one or only reverse order. So, actually, I have been discussing with the executive director within go see about this. And I know she has started some conversations in the last six months about trade negotiations around agriculture as you know nothing has changed over the last two decades. And she knows what she's heading into at the same time she has started already the conversation. Indeed, she wanted to bring us an FAO into the conversation we are supporting some of the, of the programs there. I mean, of the of the current background papers and so on. But this has started where they will conclude very soon that I'm not very sure. I think that this goes the impulse to to have those negotiations. In terms of the fourth question on, well, there was a number of questions and I could feel the loss of farmland and also in replacement of, of grains and crops I think this, starting with the last part. This is one of the issues that we advocate for as you said there has been a lot of substitution of crops that are not natural to the farmer that are less nutritious in many cases. And this is some of the things that we try to advise and work with the governments themselves to bring back a diversification of crops, as well as making sure that there's not that dependency but I asked myself the same questions that you have asked yourself. In terms of, I would say how can it be possible that we depend on on such I would say external factors or countries too many times feed the population so there's more and more of that thinking in some cases like for example, in South Asia. There's sometimes a cultural issue with relate to for example to rice production or variety of rice and so on. But other times it has been because of the historical background of the country as you said and substitution there's always a background. But for us it's very important that we go to more nutritious crop to more diversification of crops. And that's why we try to also promote in our, in our projects with the with the governments on the farmlands this reminds me. In the summit parties there was a, I'm not going to say the country but let's say the main, an entrepreneur business woman who actually was telling me where she was the biggest I would say owner of gold and minerals extraction in the kind of in one country. And she was telling me how she was trying to promote and this is real or not but she was trying to promote with the government regulations that whenever the land was acquired that still once the extraction had happened and so on still the, this small scale producers could very much have a living in the land afterwards or in a neighboring land or have swap lands but I think that's clearly one issue that a lot of African countries go through. I don't have an answer to that, perhaps on the loss of farmland due to reforestation or things like that there's business model that that we do by which we incentivize many of the farmers to grow the trees giving them some land and as the trees grow. We provide them more land and at the end of the day we manage some reforestation so that has worked for example in Kenya. I visited one project like that. As long as the incentives also for the farmers are there to generate the income the case of extraction probably depends very much on each country I'm not very familiar I just was discussing with this business woman how she was loving the government to really support them but I think that's probably a very very important discussion so. The third question in terms of squaring the start the circle with respect to prices and inputs and import substitution once more and exports. I think the key issue many times is to very much for us to increase local production and increase locally diversified and increase integration of regional markets so that's a little bit of our way to try to tackle this issue. We know it's a very challenging one at the same time without this type of focus or investments. The current status quo will not change so it's very clear that we need to address it somehow and this are our three responses there. On the climate and food financing and grant versus loans real just transition I think that's the big question right now I mean many of my meetings with Presidents in Africa actually we discussed 510 minutes about food security and rural areas and then they shift directly to climate financing climate adaptation there's a lot of issues related to that many of them have designed actually just energy transition programs. So the question you just mentioned in terms of grant and loans. I think this is not really being discussed at the international level I mean we're discussing the reform of the financial international architecture. But the reality is that grants cannot be multiplied they do not come back so how to create a mechanism that would work. We have thought. I think that the current plan of Ecuador and a debt for nature swap is interesting it's good it solves a small issue, but it does not tackle the entire obviously challenge. And I do not have an answer for that I think the current mechanisms that are being proposed are not enough to address the grant versus long we know many of the low income countries are highly indebted so actually they cannot receive any more or the court we could talk about the composition of their debt and so on. There's many nuances there but the grant versus loan issue I think it has not. It's not being really addressed or tackle and I know there's an easy. Even one innovative solution that we thought an international community which is the re channeling of special drawing rights does not seem to have fully worked or has not provided the fiscal space we were thinking it would provide. So I think there needs to be a continuation of the focus as you mentioned on that dead relief could be part of it obviously a dead common framework that actually works and provides equal treatment with private creditors I think there's advance on that. I mean to put a little bit of a hope or a positive note the reality is that one year ago we were not discussing that relief we were not discussing reform of financial architecture, we were not discussing really climate financing commitments. And the good track but obviously we are not where we should be on the last question on the COVID impact I think one of the issues that we saw during COVID was that remittances would be much more affected. We were expecting a 10 to 20% decrease at the end I think it was a single figure decrease so it remittances which are as I said before is a big financing mechanism. We did not get as impacted as we thought. In our programs what we realized we put together a rural stimulus facility to attend some of the, well in this case through vouchers to a number of different ways of trying to support small scale farmers in the country. And we realized that many of our programs need to be more responsive in the short term as I said many of our programs are five, six years longer development, but there's a lot of more shocks we're seeing we're seeing climate shock we're seeing income shock inflation some shocks. A lot of things that actually the world is becoming more volatile and more vulnerable so that's what we really learned throughout the crisis that our programs need to be more responsive. We can adjust equally to, to some of these issues we also put a crisis response initiatives. So I think we, after Ukraine so, so we have to learn somehow to adjust as much as we can, many of these shots. Thank you. Thank you President Larry. I mean I just have a question from my side I mean as we've mentioned Ireland is particularly invested in malnutrition and child wasting. Can you tell us more about if that's ambitions or plans in this space. So thank you very much. And I think for us, everything starts so to say with the ability as I said to afford a healthy diet so if you cannot afford it because your income is not enough. That's already a problem we're talking about three billion people in the world so that's clearly a huge challenge for us in many of the low income countries and countries affected by fragility this starts with providing small farmers and small scale with the ability to, to generate that income that provides them with with enough nutrition the second part of this is capacity building and awareness. As some of you pointed out before we're seeing an increased, I would say in many countries and increase the consumption of imported junk food and that's also a reality in many of these countries you have to also understand that for them it's a, it's the food itself is a luxurious item that they somehow reflect culturally as as something coming from the developed world but it's true that we are also having programs with the communities of women whereby we stress the importance of locally grown food of nutritious food. And it all starts with education so I think this both the capacity building, as well as having the income to afford nutrition are an important part of how we respond to this. Thank you. Are there any more questions from the floor. Congratulations on the innovation that you've been showing in if I think that you set a great standard for multilateral organizations personally and in my experience of if you are very progressive in how you see more sustainable solutions blended finance etc. I have signed the master accreditation agreement with the Green Climate Fund. And I'm wondering, to what extent you see carbon finance as an opportunity to create a new asset class that can draw in private sector co investment and address some of the kind of critical gaps in rural services energy water forestry etc. What are your plans in relation to that agreement. Thank you. So that's a great question we actually I was sharing before with some colleagues that we have a one and a half billion pipeline with climate funds. And an important part of this is with Green Climate Fund, which allows us also to provide some innovative projects and look into them specifically on carbon finance for me as a development finance executive I think it always has I mean finance is always to me part of the means to an end and part of the solution and I think carbon credits to me we're in the infancy we have gone already through a decade probably on that and but still there's a lot of things that we have seen it in recent reports that we still need to make sure that they are responding to the needs and for us at EFAT where I'm sitting right now. We respond to the needs of small scale producers and very much to real people and many times that translation into how they benefit from this not the financial institutions the trading the countries the macro, how it translates is very important we have to the extent to my knowledge of my knowledge we have two programs actually where we are looking into ecosystem payments in two countries related to carbon offset by small scale producers on voluntary basis. And we're pioneering and trying to pilot that to see how much it can be scaled. So I think for us is potentially part of the solution how important it can be in the future is difficult to determine, but as with the debt for nature or carbon finance or carbon offsetting or CO2 trading. I think we just need to be creative because it's clear we were talking before about grants and loans I mean it's not enough the current situation status cool it's not acceptable. We need to find new ways from our side, those new ways need to benefit the small scale producers. And that's what we are very much looking for. Thank you. Thank you. With that, I think we're going to have to draw things through clothes. But can I say thank you very much to the audience here in the room for your engagement, and indeed to all of you online as well. Thank you very much to the IAA for hosting us here today and thank you to you, President Lario for a really insightful talk and a really interesting discussions. Thank you so much.