 Good afternoon and welcome to our session on treating soil as a precious resource. I should let you know if you don't already, we're making history today for all of the concern that the World Economic Forum has had over a generation or generations on environmental issues. This is the first time that this specific topic, soil, the health of our soil and its implications for feeding the world and for having a sustainable earth, it's the first time it's had its own topic, so I think that's an important occasion. I think it's not coincidental that our session before we get to our panel is going to be kicked off by a special speaker, Secretary of State Blinken, is here probably there's no panel at Davos this year where he wouldn't have something relevant to say and be able to command the attention of people. I think it's notable that he chose this session to speak to and I think it underscores the way that our traditional thinking about diplomacy, about national security is expanding to include topics that wouldn't have occupied the attention of diplomats a generation ago but clearly occupy their thoughts now and will even more so in the generation ahead. So let's get underway. Secretary of State Blinken, welcome to our panel. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Good afternoon. John, my old friend. Thank you very, very much and as always here it's particularly good to be with leaders from across government, business, civil society. So when you think about soil, the U.S. Secretary of State is probably not the first person who comes to mind, but the truth is soil is literally at the root of many pressing national security challenges that we face. You all know this and we know this increasingly with every passing day. Without good soil, crops fail, prices rise, people go hungry. A rotting soil also worsens the impact of droughts, of floods, of other climate-driven extreme weather. Making crop yields even lower and as a result food even scarcer. As we meet here today, 700 million people do not know if they will have enough food to eat tomorrow. This hunger fuels instability and instability fuels hunger. A parent who can't put food on the table for their children picks up the family and moves because it's the most basic thing, the most important thing that they can do and they will do it however they have to do it. And if that means moving halfway around the world, they will. But that contributes to unprecedented migration flows that we're facing around the world. Shifting climate patterns, forced neighbors to compete for dwindling resources, further straining ethnic tensions, destabilizing entire communities. Meanwhile, Russia's attacks on fields, migranaries on ports in Ukraine, the world's breadbasket have disrupted global markets, making food harder to afford and harming the poor and most vulnerable, most of all. In the Red Sea, through which 15 percent of the world's commerce passes, Houthi attacks have forced ships to take longer, more expensive routes, further raising the price of food and energy. The United States has been and is working intensely to tackle this food crisis and support those who are most affected by it. Moving back to January of 2021, the U.S. government has devoted $17.5 billion to provide vital sustenance to people in need. We are honored to fund over one-third of the World Food Program's budget. Now, I had a chance to see some of these efforts just last week at a World Food Program warehouse in Jordan where I met with UN staff that is working relentlessly, often at great personal risk to get aid to Palestinians in Gaza, over 90 percent of whom are facing food insecurity. Too many people already go to sleep hungry and it's set to get worse. If you project out to 2050, global demand for food is projected to rise by 50 percent. But over that same period, climate change could reduce yields by as much as 30 percent. So do the math and it doesn't balance out. In short, we need to feed more people as growing food becomes harder. That's why the United States is partnering to adapt and transform agriculture and food systems because as vital as emergency assistance is, if we don't get at the underlying infrastructure, if we don't get at a way to produce better, stronger, more resilient crops, then we won't solve the problem. But we joined a pledge with over 130 countries signing the Emirates Declaration at COP 28 to address a big part of this. Our agriculture innovation mission for climate initiative with the UAE has mobilized $17 billion to invest in efforts like regenerating degraded cropland and capturing carbon in soil. Through the global partnership for infrastructure and investment, we are working with dozens of countries from India to Zambia to scale climate smart agriculture and bolster supply chains. And together with the African Union and the Food and Agriculture Organization, we've launched a new initiative. It's called Vision for Adapted Crops and Soils, or VAX. And VAX is part of the U.S. AID's flagship Feed the Future initiative. This is our comprehensive response in the U.S. government to food insecurity around the world and the approach that we have is too prompt. And it really boils down to this, two very basic things. First, we're investing above ground, identifying the indigenous African crops that are most nutritious and most resilient to climate change, improving these varieties, delivering them to the world. At the same time, we're investing below ground, mapping, conserving, building healthy soils. If you get this right, if you get the seeds right, if you get the soil right, then you have your agricultural foundation for the future. We've been incredibly fortunate at the State Department to have one of the world's leading experts, Dr. Carrie Fowler, lead our efforts and helping develop this initiative. We've committed $150 million thus far toward VAX. We're also rallying a broad coalition of governments around the world to advance this work. We have the capacity, as we're doing this, with all of this technology, to literally map the soil any place in the world, any given field to tell whether the soil is good, bad, deficient, and then to figure out how we can make it as productive as possible. So this is something that I believe is genuinely revolutionary. Seeds and soil, when we put them together and we can begin to answer a lot of the challenges that our world is going to face over the next 25 or 30 years. And so my simple pitch to you today is this, join us. This is a powerful investment. It has extraordinary, even transformational returns. Some of you may know that the word human comes from the Latin term for earth, for soil. There are a few things that are more human or more important to humanity than figuring out how to cultivate this planet so that it can feed and support all of us. We have an opportunity in this moment to actually deliver better for people today while actually building a sustainable tomorrow. So part of the reason, and John said at the outset, this event in and of itself is unusual for Davos. Building foreign policy types participate in it may also seem a little bit unusual, but it only underscores the importance that all of us attach to both this challenge, but also this incredible, incredible opportunity to get maybe the most fundamental thing in life that we need to sustain us right going forward into the future. And that's the food to feed everyone on this planet and to feed them well. So those of you who have the interest and the opportunity, please join us in this initiative, join us in this effort. We can make a huge difference together. Thanks very much. See you tonight. I don't think this conversation could have been framed any better or more economically than Secretary Blinken just did it now. We're going to follow on the way he's framed that with our panel here. Most of them don't really need a great introduction and their bios are all in the program, so I'll just call up, am I calling up everyone at one time? Should we all come up together and take our seats? One thing that I've noted is that our time is bracketed happily so because the Secretary took some of it, so I think in this session we won't have time for questions, but I am hoping people, including people like myself who are non-experts on this, will be stimulated by the session to learn more and follow on with questions and, of course, Davos is all about making context. So that's my aim with this panel. I'm aware that every person on the panel could easily fill a full session just with what they know about this topic, and so one thing I've tried to do is moderate or see if we could define it enough that we can get the best of their wisdom, certainly not all of their wisdom, really with just a couple minutes each. And to me, I'm interested with everybody, sort of what's new, what's your, people are going to be curious about what your particular angle of attack is on this soil question, and a lot of Davos this year, if I may, has been kind of downbeat. There's a lot of serious problems in the world as we all know, and so maybe it's worth taking extra effort to say what's promising, give us something to be optimistic about. I'm just going to go down the panel and then we'll, that'll give us enough grist that we can follow that where we were, where we may. We've got the Vice President of Nigeria here, Vice President Shtema, welcome, and I'll let you start off. What's your particular angle of inquiry on this question? Tell us about your efforts. Thank you so much. The issue of soil is very fundamental to the survival of humanity itself. Hence, the issue is complex, composite, and interwoven. And especially for those of us from sub-Saharan Africa, the issues are very poignant. The health of our soil is very fundamental in addressing the dilemma of food access and affordability, health and nutrition, and of course, nature and climate. So you'll find out that in sub-Saharan Africa, behind the mayhem of Boko Haram, behind the insanity of ISIS and all those terrorist organizations lies the real cause, which is extreme poverty. And how do you locate it? You locate it in the quality of our soil. The degradation of our soil resources, because the soil is not only responsible for our food, it's the source of our food supply. It's also fundamental to our environmental diversity. The quality of our soil has some mitigating effects on climate change, on our health, on our nutrition, on our economic viability. Let me just give a typical example. The leg chart. The leg chart used to be a body of water, making up 25,000 square kilometers, sustaining livelihoods to about 30 million Africans. Because of the effects of climate change and education, the quality of the soil has fallen, and leg chart has shrunk to only 10% of its initial size, hence impacting negatively on the livelihoods and lives of the people in that region. The World Bank described the northeastern portion of Nigeria, the Republic of Chad, Niger, northeastern Cameroons, and the Dapu region of Sudan as some of the poorest places on Earth, hence the emergence of militant organizations like the Genja Wood militia, like the Boko Haram, and a partile ground for the growth of ISIS and other terrorist organizations. So I'm quite glad that the issue of soil is as a front burner in today's in Dabu's interface. Because without improving on the quality of our soil, there is no way that the world can fit itself. Because of the crisis in Ukraine, the whole of Africa has got fever. So this is why I'm quite thrilled to be here, to contribute my own perspective on how to regenerate the soil. And I believe that with renewed attention and drive towards soil quality, the future is bright for the world. Thank you. Ambassador Cindy McCain, those of us who cover politics, of course, know you in a different context. This is a new context. Can you tell us about your new job, relatively new since April, as the Executive Director of the United Nations World Food Program, and how you're attacking this issue? Well, thank you. And I would like to commend the people that decided to put soil finally on the agenda. This issue is such an important issue, and it's something that all of us are going to have to work on together. WFP picks up the pieces when things come apart. That's our job. That's who we are. And that's how we operate. But we are also trying to build resilience around the world and make sure that those who cannot feed themselves might have a shot at feeding themselves. If we do the right things. Soil is an intricate part of this. And I know I'm not telling you anything you don't know, but without good soil or with the combination of conflict and climate, and I'm going to throw water in there as well, things just don't operate well. So we're faced with having to, number one, bring food in, which is hard to get now, especially with what's happened in Ukraine. But number two, try to figure out what's going on with the soil. So for us, we've had to adapt as an organization. We've had to rethink how we do things in the field. And what does that mean? We are using science and technology now to not just map soil, but also be able to tell whether it's good, whether it's bad, as Secretary Blinken said, what's going on, et cetera. So we can better not just educate our farmers, but also be able to give them the tools to be able to build a small family farm or a larger farm as well. But what does, what else does that mean? It means in the long run that global security is better. We are seeing right now a huge exodus coming up to the dry corridor up into Mexico, all the way up to the southern border of Arizona. Why is that happening? People are hungry. They're scared. So food plays an intricate role, as was said, in national security. And so we feel that what we do at WPP is equally as important, not just feeding the insecure, but also making sure that people can be resilient. And lastly, what I would like to say also is that in Africa, alone, as was mentioned, 100 million hectares of land have been degraded, 100 million hectares. So it's up to all of us to join together as countries, as companies, as aid workers, like some of us, to be able to not only help rebuild that land, but make sure that it has a future and an understanding of what it takes to build good soil and to build a good life on the good soil. Thank you. Agnes Calabata, the president of Agra, Kenya. And I'm wondering, please address this however you like, but one thing that Ambassador McCain touched on also caught my attention, which is the role of small farmers and small landholders in this. In the United States, of course, we're used to thinking especially of big agriculture. But we're not going to solve this problem without thinking of the question of scale. It seems to me that problem is compounded when you're dealing with an almost infinite roster of players and people affecting it. So perhaps you could tell us about your work with an accent on the role of small landholders. Thank you. But let me start by also thanking Tanya and the whole team at WEF for putting this on the agenda. I mean, three years ago, two years ago, last year we were here in the middle of a food crisis. And there was very little conversation around what is going on in food. So to be here immediately after COP28 and the declaration we just launched at COP28 with 159 countries signing up to the Emirates Declaration and promising action and now coming here quickly to start talking about action around that declaration, I think this is extremely huge and we're extremely grateful. But like Ambassador McCain is saying, soil is extremely important for food security. I mean, look at one country that has a problem is that war that's a Russia-Ukraine crisis and Africa goes hungry. Honestly, what's that? What does that mean? And we talk about 60% of the world's remaining Arab land being in Africa, except 65%. As you just said, 65% of that is degraded. So that's why despite all the efforts we are making, we see that we don't go beyond the one ton per hectare when farmers in Iowa are making 15 tons per hectare. So this is a challenge that requires everybody to engage and I'm glad that we are here public sector with his excellency and the vice president of Nigeria, private sector, we have here and all of us from other institutions looking at this problem. There's no farmer that is going to solve the soil health challenge. We have to have the right incentives. What's the incentive for the farmer to go out there and solve the soil health challenge? There's not enough investment at that level that can solve the soil challenge that we are facing today. And there are probably no policies to facilitate and push that conversation forward. So what we need to do is to start working together on solutions that we know and there are quite many. As Agra, we are working on regenerative agriculture and trying to understand how working on improving soil and rebuilding soil health, carbon especially, helps water-holding capacity for farmers that get one crop where crops were already were failing. How different types of mixes of crops as Secretary Brinken was talking with Carrie Fauras' work, how that is beginning to shape how we decide which crops to put in the soil. Just taking care of the productivity and the growth of the soil itself. But here is the bottom line. The bottom line is we will need scale and that scale is not going to come from farmers and smallholder farmers. That scale is going to come from very intentional policies that encourage investments, very intentional collaboration across all of us that allow us to do the right things to incentivize farmers to protect land. And for Africa, one of the biggest ones is actually allowing land ownership so that farmers, I mean, what is the incentive for me to protect the land that I don't own? And helping farmers understand that there's actually helping governments understand that there's a difference between land and soil. Land is the thing. Soil is what gives us food and you're not investing enough in that soil. Thank you. It's fine, we didn't use our time in the green room as well as I should have because I should have gotten a better pronunciation of your last name. I could imagine it with a hard T or a TH sound. Holtzetter. Holtzetter, okay. You are the president and chief executive of Yara International. We just mentioned the role of the private sector. You're carrying a special burden on this panel because you're the sole representative of that. Tell us the role of the private sector in particular, your company at Yara International on these issues. And first, I'm really thrilled that soil is now on the world agenda and want to thank the World Economic Forum for that. And not only is it on the agenda but that we should treat it as a precious resource. And it's about time because we've been treating soil as dirt for way too long now. And it's as simple as this. If we don't get soil health right, we don't get food security. If we don't have food security, we don't have security. And we should have learned that lesson now with what we've seen in the last few years and particularly after Russia's war on Ukraine. But still with that backdrop, we still see loss of land. Every five seconds, land the size of a soccer pitch is being lost for soil erosion. And we need to get healthy soils. And I seen it firsthand being with farmers. What does it mean when you have a healthy soil? Well, then you get so many things for free. You get better yield. You get better quality. The crops pick up their food from the soil and you have better nutritious food that goes into humans as well. It's better to hold water. 70% of water is being consumed by agriculture. And I've been with farmers with plots right next to each other. One taking care of the soil and with healthy soil and one without. And with extreme weather, one lost the entire crop. The other one kept it. So this is really about food security. Then we could wonder why are we not able to make more progress? Well, I think we have failed at putting farmers in the center. How do we incentivize farmers? How do we help farmers? Because we got the food system that we pay for. One only focused on output and not on soil conditions and climate. And that's where we need to step up and support farmers. And I agree with Secretary Blinken and with the other panelists here that we have technology in place. But we don't have an infrastructure. We don't have a definition of what regenerative agriculture really is. We don't have even a standard to identify the field of a farmer. And if you come to that, what do we do with land ownership as Agnes brought up? So we need to combine all of that. And that's where we'd like to gain traction from the private sector, from the public sector, from NGOs as well, to create this infrastructure, a global database where we can put in place standards and a way to measure so that we can incentivize farmers to drive this. There is funding available. The hidden cost of the food system could finance this, but it requires an infrastructure. So let's build now on what we have soil on the agenda. But let's help the farmers with an infrastructure that can help to get financial rewards as well. Thank you. Finally, we have, we've already heard from an UN executive director. We've also got an executive secretary here on the panel, Abraham, it's a TH, or? Chau. Chau. Yeah. Is executive secretary of the UN Convention to combat dissertification? I'm curious, how long has that convention been around? 30 years. 30 years. And I'm curious that you don't know about it. And let me tell you a little bit more about it. Soil is the most important natural capital we live in. Humanity depends on two things. Few inches of soil and few millimeters of rain. We, as humanity, have been messing up with the soil. And this is where the UN Convention to Combat Desertification was born. It's one of the Rio Conventions together with climate and biodiversity. We have been messing up with soil. And today, we degrade the equivalent of 100 million hectares of land every year. Africa alone has lost, over the last four years, the equivalent of the size of DRC. That's how big it is. We have been messing up with our natural capital. Nature and climate change have been messing up on the millimeters of rain with droughts, which are much more frequent and much more severe. Now, Secretary Blinken talked about a growing population by 2050, but we do have shrinking resources. So we do, as humanity, are facing a fundamental challenge, which is the number one security challenge that we are going to face in the future. We will no longer be able to feed everybody. So we will have more migration. We will no longer be able, at least in some places in the world. This is what is leading to migration. Migration is not necessarily international. It can be regional. It can be from rural areas to cities. But a lot of people will be on the move. We will be having more security challenges in the world, not only the Boko Harams and so forth, that are basically dancing on this root cause, which is lack of water and land. That is the root cause of the problem. The rest is basically geopolitics and governance. We are also facing a huge global challenge in the world in terms of security. Because if Lakeshade is shrinking or the RLC is dead, there is no sea anymore, then we have hundreds of millions of hectares of land that are no longer able to produce food for everybody. So we will be faced with similar problems in other parts of the world. Then we have the one we have in Disahel. There are a few solutions, and I'll finish with that. Today we have 1.5 billion hectares of land that we can reform, that we can put back to health that are not difficult to actually restore and put back to health. And it is not necessarily very expensive so far. It can be more expensive in the future if you don't take care. So do we have a deliberate policy, conscious policy, to actually invest on our national capital and make sure that we restore it for the future generations? 1.5 billion hectares of land. Unless we do it, we are likely to degrade more billions of hectares of land, which will be put us in a very difficult situation. So invest on land, invest on soil, invest on water management, and invest on resilience building, both economic resilience, social resilience, but also ecological resilience. One opportunity we have, and we'll finish with that, is next conference of the parties. We have COPs. You may have heard about Dubai for COP28. Well, let me tell you the good news that we have three COPs this year. One for biodiversity in Colombia in October, one for climate in Azerbaijan in November, and one for land drought, which is the desertification convention in Saudi Arabia, Riyadh in December, 2024. This will be a very good opportunity for us to again review the issue of land management, to review the issue of land tenure, and women's access to land will be a big issue there because we have a big problem in the world today in terms of land tenure. This is where business industry will have a very important role to play and invest on their own land so as to maintain and sustain the production, rather than try to shift because there are no more reserves. There are no more forests to degrade or no more wetlands. Even the billions of hectares of land in Africa, that was 50 years ago. We need to review our statistics and analysis. So it is certainly one of the opportunities we have. 197 parties will be coming together just as in Dubai to adopt policies explicitly on land, water, and soil. Thank you. Just a question for the non-experts like myself. The 1.5 billion acres that you could be restored. Logistically, what's involved in, what does that require? It requires changing the way we produce food today because we have been extracting rather than managing the land. So Yara is certainly one of the promoters and Agra and others. So invest on soil management, invest on land management and make sure that we do not degrade more land by trying to produce food. The number one driver of land degradation in the world is food, by far, feed and fiber, cotton for our fashion. So it is important that we actually do it differently. It requires also restoring severely degraded land that we can put back to health. It requires investing on ecotourism and some of the conservancies in the world today that are generating income that are likely to change. And it requires, finally, to change the way we do mining. Millions of hectares of land are being lost today due to mining activities. I'm not saying that mining is not important, but it is one of the causes of land degradation. If I may, in our remaining time, I heard two challenges in the different presentations you made. One is, to me, seems to involve the capital. How do you get the investment necessary to make changes? The other is governance, which is a particular problem on really all environmental issues because the problem is international and character. The consequences of it are profoundly local and character. And so even if somebody had the perfect solution, they'd have very limited political means to decree or impose that perfect solution. Maybe we could play with those two challenges in our time. First off, you had mentioned infrastructure and what a challenge that is. How are we gonna solve that problem? Does that mean government subsidy? Does that mean, or can private capital build some of this infrastructure you mentioned? Please expand on that. I think this has to be a joint effort. This can not only be driven by the private sector. This has to be a joint effort where we agree on certain standards that we have something to measure against because how can we improve something if we can't measure and how do we measure if we don't have a standard? So that needs to be in place and that's not no single company can do that. No single government. It's about finding the right way and then to get it with farmers so that we do it in a way that is helpful for the farmers. But at the same time, in order to drive this, we also need to put a price on nature. That nature has a value because for too long now, it's been cheaper to destroy nature and mine this whole of its nutrients and then leave it behind as degraded land. So when we connect this and get farming right and work together with the farmers to make sure that the soils are healthy and we replace the nutrients that we take out, well then it's healthy. But if you don't have a price that incentivizes this or then we're not gonna be able to drive this at scale. So that is key, I believe. Mr. Vice President, address the political challenge. There's no soil czar that could impose what we might all agree are rational, sensible solutions. And in one sense that leads to a kind of a sense of despair. How will the problem be solved in your country if the origin is coming partly within your country but partly from outside? Well certainly one of the solutions has to do with improving the quality of governance. Like the Great Green Wall project that cuts across the whole of Sub-Saharan Africa. If this Great Green Wall is given the impetus to support that it requires, it will bring about a major change in the landscape. Secondly and most importantly, there has to be community ownership. The people have to own and drive the process. Where government will come in is in the areas of extension services, improved agricultural practices, precision agriculture and sustainable and regenerative agricultural practices that will put food on the table and also reclaim the land. And as rightly said by Mr. Fiam, the whole mantra is on increase in yield. There is a whole wide gap between the output in much more advanced nations than in Africa. And fundamentally, once we adopt improved agricultural practices, fertilization, tractorization, improved seeds and most importantly, soil mapping, the quality of the soil is absolutely essential. And we are going to cross the Rubicon and reach the promised land. It's not something that can be done overnight but trust me whether the will, the political will, the vision and the commitment, I believe that will start covering some mileage. Ambassador McCain, I've got sort of two related questions for you. If I may, I was struck by in your opening remarks, you weren't citing from a US perspective far off places you were talking about the American Southwest. Do you think this is going to become an increasingly prominent issue in US political discussion where I don't think we've been really talking much about soil? And the others, I know you're out of the campaign business now, but we have heard in, certainly in the national security context, there's no question that as far as the future of NATO or the future of American commitment to assisting Ukraine, we all recognize that the outcome of this election in the United States would have potentially profound implications for that. Do you see this election as having important consequences on your issue, which is soil? I think it has huge consequences on this issue because if we slow down or choose to take another path, we could devastate an entire continent with this. You mentioned whether or not this has taken hold in the Southwest, Western United States or within the United States. Well, yeah, we were just caught with our pants down, to be honest with you, I'm from Arizona and all of a sudden people are surprised we don't have any water because they've been overusing it for so many years. So we're in a context now where we are now beginning to race to the finish line to try not to be without water or be without good soil as well. Three things I'd like to just mention and I know we're short on time here but one of them is our early warning and anticipatory actions that can be taken. And what does that mean? It means that it would trigger humanitarian support before the community was hit by drought or by floods. Secondly, community, as you mentioned, the community led resilience programs are most important in all of this because it teaches good habits also and it teaches it through schools and through community centers, et cetera. And then third, we use a thing called climate risk insurance programs. That's been very successful for those, again, the smallholder farmers, I know, but that's who we deal with on our level in being able to make sure that they're covered and also accommodated for what could or could not happen. And finally, I'll end with, we've all seen the misuse of fertilizer. We've seen it, you've seen it in your own yards, I've seen it where I live, teaching not just better habits but teaching how to use more organic substances and more organic ideas rather than just going to the market or going to, you know, being donated out a bottle of whatever this chemical can do. So there's a lot of different things and at WFP, we say, look, we wanna do all these things, try to figure it out and put ourselves out of business because we don't wanna be here for this. We wanna be done with it. Ms. Calabada, we've seen a lot of Davos's here about artificial intelligence and it seems to me more often than not, it's, we're discussing that in somewhat dystopian terms, what if we can't properly regulate AI or that it's used as an instrument of surveillance and oppression rather than an instrument of empowerment. I'm curious from, on the perspective of this issue, do you have a particular vantage point on how we should be thinking about technological advances? Are they gonna help us solve this problem? Is there a role for AI in this? Sure, 100%, about five, 10 years ago, one of the biggest pieces of interest on the African continent, for example, is when countries do soil maps and then that soil map is put under no-can-key because it's the hugest, most important asset that a government has in terms of that understanding. You don't want that knowledge to be misused. Today, the ability to understand what is in the soil and ability to understand the quality of our soil has been made so much easier and so much more affordable that soil tests are hundreds of what they were five years ago and that's information that can be easily generated and built. But to the point you're raising, we need to use that ability to digitize soils and assets to turn it into an asset class for farmers so that it becomes a major part of the incentives of why farmers invest in soil. If a farmer is investing in improving biodiversity on their land, they should get biodiversity credits and the systems are already there in place. If a farmer is investing in improving carbon through regenerative agriculture and building carbon, they should get carbon credits and that information is building. And at community level, for communities, because again, nobody can protect a soil alone, especially if you're in a country like Rwanda where what happens up in the mountain affects you in the valley, nobody can do that alone. So we need communities to work together as well. That should translate into credits for these communities. So AI can be able to pull all that stuff together and rationalize it for farmers and farming communities, help us from a scientific perspective, understand what are the issues we need to be pursuing, but also give governments and private sector the data and the information and the backbone, infrastructure backbone they need to be able to move this point forward and to be able to move soils forward. Let me conclude on this. In May, this year, the African Union has a soil health and fertilizer summit, really for two reasons. We need to understand how we can deal with the challenge of food security so that there's an engine site for a world food program and others, number one, number two, we need to invest in soils and better soils. So this meeting will be happening at continental level, it's the Heads of State level summit and I know there's a lot of information from all of us scientists, all of us private sector, all of us, I'm not African Union, but as an interested African, I think this is something we must have on our agenda. So we've got two minutes left and I propose to surrender the moderator's prerogative and just go down our panel and ask you each if you could tell us what the most interesting thing you learned from another panelist today is what you're gonna be taking home or was especially stimulating to your own thinking. Let's start all the way down, it's really only about 30 seconds for you. Quickly, focus on increasing productivity but also focus on reducing food waste and food loss. You know that farmers produce painfully, especially in Africa, just to lose 40% of that for lack of energy and lack of access to the market. So provide them with the energy that they need to actually store it and be able to put it into market. Perfect. Building on Agnes and Cindy on fertilizer, half of the rural population gets food because of fertilizer but we need to use that in the right way so that if we tailor that to the needs of the soil like Agnes talked about. Farmers want to produce without the right incentives, without the right, so they need markets, they need fertilizers that work with them for them and they need policies that allow them to own land so that they have the right incentives. For me, it's about incentives, incentives, what is the need for the farmer? Ambassador McCain. I think most generally the influence that governments can have over this and the ability to not only protect markets but encourage markets and make sure that our local farmers have the needs that they are met so that they can farm. Mr. Vice President, I'd like to give you the last word. Empowering the small-scale farmer is the key to economic emancipation and development of the African continent. Thank you very much. Thank you all. Thank you.