 Our keynote speaker in this opening session is Dr. Ahim Doppelman, deputy director general for research at the International Rise Research Institute. Ahim is soil scientist and economist with more than 25 years experience working in Asia, North America and Central and Southern Europe. Most of his career focuses on Rise Research. He is recognized internationally as an authority on science and technology for security and sustainable management of the world's major serial crop systems. Currently, Ahim provides strategic leadership and oversight for trees, city research and outreach programs on strategic resources, rice breeding, crop management, climate change, socio-economic and policy research, information sharing and capacity building. Today Ahim's keynote is on actual rating crop improvement for sustainable development. Ladies and gentlemen, Dr. Ahim Doppelman. Maybe I should start singing something for a change. I've done that once and I own the price for this but I don't think I can do it again. So, I'd like to talk to you this morning about how people who work in crop genetics and in particular rice genetics can probably make even bigger and faster contributions to the new sustainable development agenda that we need to address in the next 15 to 20 years. And the starting point of that is that at the turn of the century, the international community, the governments of this world agreed to tackle eight millennium development goals. And those will run out in about two years at the end of 2015 and you can see them listed on this slide. And even so, progress against these eight goals and there are many different targets. I think there is about 54 specific targets and then indicators are being used to measure them. Even though the progress in terms of achieving those has varied quite widely from country to country, I think there is a general recognition that is good to global goals that can lead to motivate countries, donors, individual people to act. Because if you don't have those goals and if you don't have specific targets in mind and also precise measures to report against, you may be not moving in the right direction. So, the first goal, millennium development goal, one eradicating hunger and poverty, is the one where we in Asia in particular have made most progress. And essentially, particularly in Southeast Asia, it has been achieved already on an average basis. That doesn't mean that we can stop. It still means that we still have to eradicate extreme hunger and poverty completely and we have to also achieve it in every country in Africa. But in addition to continuing many of those original goals, we are going to face a whole set of new challenges. And in my opinion, the primary driver for that, in addition to all the drivers that we are aware of, climate change, population growth, food security, the primary driver in the next 15 years is going to be broad material improvement of life. There is now 6 billion people who want to catch up with 1 billion people who have already gotten used to consuming large amounts of goods, resources. So, it's estimated that by 2030, there may be as many as 5 billion people who on a daily basis consume goods and services in the range of 10 to 100 dollars per person every day. 5 billion people. And that will also mean that to achieve that kind of level of consumption is likely that the global economy on an average basis will grow at the rate of 3 to 4 percent each year, means it will double in size every 18 to 20 years, every generation. So, if you compare it to the day and look ahead at the year 2050, it is likely that the size of the global economy is more than 300 trillion dollars on an annual basis. Difficult to predict, depends on the number of people and the rate of growth, but that's the kind of challenge that we are facing. And that raises, of course, many questions. Is it actually possible to achieve that level of consumption? What are the new problems that we are creating? We have already, in many parts of the world, levels of overconsumption that lead to a whole range of new problems. And overweight and obesity is just one set of those that then often also lead to becoming the major source or the major reason for non-communicable diseases as now the primary cause of death in the world. So it's not going to be infectious diseases anymore or hunger. It's increasingly going to be diseases that have to do with overconsumption or the wrong kind of nutrition, the wrong kind of lifestyle that we are going to face. And you can see the red areas in this map. And the big question for us is, of course, what happens to all the other parts of the world that are on that map at present still light blue or blue? Will they follow the same paths as the rich countries have done? Will they make the same mistakes maybe? And what if every person in India and in China and in the Philippines and in Indonesia aspires to consume the same amount of food and other resources as people in the rich countries already do? Will it be possible to go that direction? And then if that was the case, then obviously we would be consuming natural resources, perhaps at a rate that could lead to exceeding what are at present thought to be planetary boundaries. So the boundaries that we could probably establish in some way to describe what is the safe operating space for humanity on Earth. There's a lot of debate about these boundaries. Are they really realistic? Are they quite empirically defined right now in terms of, for example, nitrogen fluxes or climate change or ocean acidification or biodiversity loss or water use? But the bottom line is that there is a carrying capacity probably on Earth that if we want to have a sustainable development we should probably not exceed. And you can scale this down to the level of each individual country or even the regions within a country. What is the safe operating space? So these are some of the challenges that we are facing and therefore there is a growing consensus, also growing out of the Rio plus 20 meeting a few years ago that the new global sustainable development agenda must have four dimensions. Economic development countries must be able to develop people want to proceed in life. They want to economically get stronger. We need to ensure social inclusion. We cannot increase the gap between the rich and the poor further because that will lead to social instability. Environmental sustainability, I think we are all aware of that and on top of all and cutting across all of the other three pillars we must have higher levels of good governance. And the global scale and the regional scale and the country scale and the sub-national scale. So these are generally sought now to be the primary dimensions of sustainable development. And there is a process now ongoing at various levels globally to define a new set of sustainable development goods which will likely to be approved and adopted by the international community sometime in 2015 before the current Millennium Development Goals run out. This process is led by an open working group of the United Nations and you can see the website listed there and I encourage you to take a look at this. There are other activities and I've listed a few there that feed into this process. Consultations, a high level panel of experts that already submitted the report and the suggestion for 12 sustainable development goals. And lastly a group that I've been involved with since November last year and where I'm chairing the working group on sustainable agriculture and food systems. It's called the Sustainable Development Solutions Network or STSN. It's an initiative for the United Nations but it's primarily designed to mobilize the science, education and technology and business community to contribute to a new agenda for sustainable development. You can find on the website a report in which we have proposed 10 sustainable development goals and 30 targets as examples and another report in which we have gone into much more detail with regard to future directions for agriculture. Also some of the specific targets and indicators to use and some of the practical solutions and implementation considerations. The point I want to make is that even scientists like many of you who work sometimes on very specific, very detailed aspects of a particular scientific discipline and genetics is one that is pretty much at the upstream end of science in many cases. Even every scientist working on those things should be aware of what the goals of different agendas are and how your work can follow. They are meant to motivate people to act. They are meant to also focus governments, donors, individual people on issues of high priority. That's, I think, where we as scientists have increasingly also a responsibility to speak up and let policymakers and others know what we believe are the right things to do. That's where increasingly we need to come out of our labs and offices and serve and post shelves of science. We need to speak to the public. We need to understand what we are doing and why we are doing it. And genetics is one of those subjects where there's a lot of public debate and a lot of public misunderstanding what it actually is. So I encourage you to take a look at this and learn more about this. Now specifically we have proposed, as you can see, in our group 10 sustainable development goals that would cover all of those four dimensions of sustainable development. I'm not going to go through all of them. The only comment I want to make is that whatever the final list of these goals and targets will be, it is clear already that agriculture and in the wider sense food systems will be a central component of the next global sustainable development agenda. That is because food security has risen to prominence again but it is also because of all of the other multiple dimensions agriculture contributes to. Health, biodiversity, climate change, environment, these are more listed there. And even economic and social development. So we have an opportunity and we have a great responsibility to do more. So what does it mean for people who work on rice? So I think the first point to make is that the global rice equation as we like to call it an eerie hasn't really changed. We thought ten years ago that consumption would level off or start slowing down because of shifts in consumer patterns but as you can see it has kicked up again in the last few years and we are basically on a linear trend that associates consumption directly with the number of people on earth. For every one billion person or people we need to produce about 100 million tonnes of rough rice or paddy more. So if by 2050 we have 2 billion more people as it is projected roughly obviously we will need 200 million tonnes of paddy more each year at that stage. Now you could say people will be eating less rice and switch to other foods. That's what we assumed over many years the reality is that in the last 20 years per capita rice consumption on a global average scale has not changed at all. It has gone down in some countries but up in others. Where this will go in the next 20 years we don't know but I can assure you that at least for the next 5, 10, probably 15 years won't change much. We also believe that increasingly we see economic growth consumers and those who serve consumers through the food processors export industry will increasingly play a role in driving what kind of food they want and therefore also what kind of rice they want. And sometimes even how they want this food or this rice to be grown. You can see already an increasing diversity of rice in the shelves of supermarkets not picture was taken in the grocery store in Kathu, Minnesota. So that's what I think we have to keep in mind also when we talk about research and genetics and breeding it will diversify in terms of the demands. It will not just be rice it will be many different kinds of rice. On the supply side, on the production side perhaps one of the biggest challenges is the rising labour question. You can see in India and Bangladesh this is an example where you think there is plenty of people looking for work in rural areas we have seen labour costs in the last 10, 12 years rising by 3 to 400%. So what does that mean for farmers? It means there will be less people there will be more need to increase farm sizes and mechanized farming and that raises also the question what is going to be the future for small rice farmers like this couple in Jakan state in India? Will they have a future? Will they be able to make a decent living from an acre of land? Or even if it is too? Or are there other trajectories? Will their children want to have that kind of lifestyle? What is the new business model for small farmers in Asia? And there is a lot of interesting trends emerging already like this example from South Vietnam where now new small enterprises basically new kinds of co-point of this you wish are forming that group farmers into larger production units that then are being serviced directly without many middlemen directly by a company that not only does the milling and processing of the rice for domestic and export markets but also provides agronomic services inputs financing and also buys the rice These kind of business models for small farmers I believe will be needed if we also want to take advantage of new technologies in Asia We cannot get stuck at the level of the very small poor resource poor farmer we have to advance in technology but also in the socio-economic setting in business approach to farming And then what we have also noticed in recent years is that the rice seed sector is changing with private companies increasingly playing a role not just in terms of producing and selling hybrid seeds but also doing more and more R&D in hybrid breeding and genetics trade development and some also probably in the future increasingly moving towards even high quality hybrid rice varieties as a company product But on the consumer end of course we have an increasing interest of the processing industry So that has severe implications also for the role of public sector research and breeding How are we going to interact with the increasing number of private sector players? Do we see it as a competition or do we see it as an opportunity? I believe it is a huge opportunity because private companies generally speaking are very incentivized to bring good products to many farmers and consumers if you wish for them, customers whereas public sector often lacks this ability and this incentive for this So we need to find ways to effectively not just support this process but also fill on our own those leaves that are still not going to be covered by the private sector and I believe the price market is large enough for everyone We have a long way to go but we need to find the right mechanisms for this And I think for us and the institutions in particular who are involved in rice breeding the fundamental question becomes how can we do breeding very differently than we used to do A few months ago actually a few weeks ago I visited the Jakan state in eastern India and I went there because I wanted to see the beginning dissemination of a new trot along variety, Sabagi Dan which was released there in 2009 and is now spreading one of the fastest rising rice varieties in all of India Now when you look back and trace the history of how we got to that stage it's very typical for public sector approach It started out in 1997 with a breeder, an iri, Brigitte Courtois making a cross between an iri and a traditional variety intending to create a variety for upland rice And then we had a succession of projects with funds from many, many donors bits and pieces, we're piecing together a continued research process three breeders involved over 12 years a national partner in India in the trot network until finally after 12 years we had a variety that was the least 12 years Now the release was for Ringford Lone and Rice not the originally intended target but it turned out to be the right product for that So 12 years and this is a fantastic product farmers like it it meets the local demand also because it's short iteration but 12 years is not going to be good enough anymore in the future we cannot justify that type of approach we have already examples of how to move faster so in the same state just about a week, two weeks ago our first molecular breeding product for trot tolerance IR64 upgraded with two trot QTL QTL 2.2 and 4.1 was released and what's interesting is there we have a product concept that is slightly different so we have a high yielding variety that must yield the same on the non-stress conditions as the recurrent parent it must have the same eating quality and it must have a big yield advantage on the trot you can see the numbers there but what I find most intriguing is that from the parent to the release of this variety it took us 6 years Now of course you know that Mark assisted back-crossing is much faster the actual breeding pure breeding of those genes we can now do in less than 3 years but that's the potential that I believe breeders and people working in genetics need to completely understand and utilize more how can we accelerate rice breeding and how can we make better products that meet more specifically the needs of specific market segments or to consumer requirements the needs of specific environments and cropping systems so the farmer requirements we cannot hope to have many more mega varieties that fit everybody's needs we need to be more precise we need to be more fast on it and that has been fundamental underlying reason for why we believe that public breeding programs need to be restructured in a similar way that the private sector often already operates so we need breeding pipelines some variety development pipelines that are driven by clearly defined breeding products and the trade packages that are based on a clear understanding of those demands and we need then of course the trade discovery research cutting across and serving those pipelines in an efficient manner so at Erie we have gone in this direction in the last maybe one and a half to two years and here is one example I just took this picture last week at our main breeding site near Bujumbura in Burundi where we have now a regional breeding hub for Eastern Southern Africa and you can see on this signboard there I'm not sure how easy it is to read the product specifications for this particular product we have in-bred varieties for rain-fed lowland ecosystems in Eastern Southern Africa they have must-have trades they have range trades and they have wind trades breeders, geneticists and more physiologists need to be able to spell those out very clearly and precisely the breeding pipelines need to be organized along that line this is our new breeding structure at Erie we have seven variety pipelines you can see them here for irrigated and rain-fed ecosystems a regional one for Eastern Africa a Japanese pipeline for temperate as well as tropical environments they are driven on top by market research and market segmentation analyzes and the rice market information system that we are building they are fed and fueled by trade development teams that provide the necessary know-how and gene discovery and actual breeding-ready trades for each of these pipelines and then cutting across we take measures now to accelerate breeding in all stages to cut the variety development time in half this is our goal in half nothing shorter than that or longer than that if you wish and move also to multi-environment testing and a much more systematic manner much faster so what measures can we take to from a genetics point of view a genetics research point of view further enhance progress in these areas so I want to highlight the three areas genomics, phenotyping and then a little bit on disease deployment of resistance genes so in the area of genetic resources understanding we believe that we must move now towards what we may call my friend he is calling rapid response genetic resources on one side we want to of course sequence the genomes of all the accessions we have in our gene banks but more and more we also need to move towards creating new breeding-ready populations and the gene pools that we can evaluate for new trades in a rapid response manner to the demands of breeding you will probably hear more about this later this week we have just completed the sequencing 3000 new rice genomes together with BGI and Cass and China this is the first illustration of how these data look like you can see how they are nicely clustering into the different subspecies of rice this is obviously a massive amount of data and it will become publicly available later this year 300,000 slips 200,000 slips on 3,000 new genomes so many of you will have their hands full doing something useful with this but we also have I think in recent years made a lot of interesting progress in creating new breeding materials I show two examples here magic populations we have a whole string of those and I think you will see those during the field-tour area I hope or at least get more information on this but also NAM populations that were primarily also graded by our colleagues at Seattle Africa Rice these are great resources carrying many valuable breeding-ready trades and we need real test cases where we can learn how to deploy rapid response genetic resources in the development of actual breeding products here is one example we know and we have started to work much more on specific products for dry, direct seeded rice as one of the future cropping systems options for rice that we are seeing emerging in many parts of Asia because of the labour shortages and the need to mechanism but we need a different plant time for this and it needs to have some very specific traits so you can list it here you can see listed here seven of them some of them we understand many of them we don't