 I suggest that we go to the third part of our workshop, looking at what we call urgency, so one of which is indeed food security, and the second one being the electricity supply challenge. So we'd like to hand over to Dr. Isabelle Sacock, floor is yours. Can you all hear me? Yeah. Okay. Looking around the room I can see none of us here really go to bed hungry on a routine basis. But I come from Mauritius where it's not so uncommon. A lot of people go to bed hungry year in, year out, and in fact this is what got me interested in poverty and food security. Now when I compare Mauritius to parts of being in Bangladesh or Africa I think we're actually well off. So you know it really depends on the context. We can see from the statistics that you know billions of people either are chronically hungry or severely malnourished. In simple terms this is a nightmare. It's really a nightmare to live that way. So you referred to the United Nations food systems and I think that was fantastic. I mean the global cry there was we need to transform our food systems, transform. That's a very big term. And we need to transform it if we want to eliminate hunger, if we want to achieve those sustainable development goals by 2030. That's only 10 years away. It's not a long time at all. So that is a very ambitious goal. So let me have the first slide so that's, oh let me see where I can move it, yes. I like the way the EAT Landsat Commission puts it. Food in the Anthropocene represents one of the greatest health and environmental challenges of the 21st century. I mean food is fundamental. We have to eliminate chronic hunger. Now we have to transform the way we produce, process, distribute our food, what they call and I think rightly so, I like the term the great food transformation. Now ending hunger and poverty and sharp inequality is really an old problem. You know, it's only modern industrial age that whole societies like in the West have been free from what's called hunger and premature death. So however we can see with a great inequality that so many people are still in that kind of nightmare scenario. That requires that we simultaneously, and that's the key word, simultaneously transform agriculture and food, macroeconomic management, social protection, not to mention many other things we heard about energy and so on and so forth. So here we're really talking of really heavy lifting. This transformation according to them, because we're in such an interdependent world all under the threat, existential threat of climate change. This transformation will not happen unless there's widespread, widespread is key, multi sector, it's not just agriculture either, multi action, level action to change what we eat, how it's produced for the global population. I mean, it's a very big ambition. It's something we haven't been able to do despite the growth of some countries in the West. Really a minority of countries are well off. The majority of the world are not well off at all, varying degrees, but they are not well off. Since food is the first medicine, people cannot have food. They cannot be healthy. I mean, period. And when the pandemic has showed us that people now, they don't have food, then they are struck by disease. And so, you know, if we don't get up and run and do something, we're going to get worse and worse. So this is really an urgent problem. And I'm really glad you put it as urgency. It is absolutely urgent. So what I'd like to do in the few minutes is I'd like to point out what is the conceptual approach that is required to solve this food security problem. I hope later we can discuss the specifics and what happens in the world. And I'd like to draw from Peter Temer, who is a foremost authority on food security. This is a complicated diagram, but I just want to make a few points which is really characteristic of his approach. Number one is his approach is holistic. And that is important, holistic. You see, it's macro, it's micro, it's short term, it's long term. You see, there are so many quadrants in there, and we can talk about each of them. Each of them is very difficult to achieve. But now you have to achieve all of them. And as he puts it, sustained policy attention is required. Is required. Not like maybe you can do it, maybe you can't to achieve these objectives. His book is a really great subtitle. It's food security and scarcity. Why is ending chronic hunger so hard? Everybody says, well, we should end hunger. But it's actually really hard to do it. There's a good reason why we didn't get there. It's not because people are wicked or whatever. Just the nature of the task is really difficult to do that. So I hope we can discuss more, all the quadrants in there. I'd like to look at his approach, but from a different angle, where he talks of the development trilogy. I mean, Peter Timmer has worked a lot in Asia, in Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam, and so on. And his view is Asian governments, that is their development goal. The development trilogy. Not just growth, but they want equity and they want stability. It's like the three legs of a stool. You have to have the three. Now to have this, oh my God, what happened to the thing? It will come back. Oh, I will have some mushroom in the meantime. That's okay. Yes, I love mushroom. And now we have a dog. Okay, shall we go back to the development trilogy? Foodie, it will come back. Okay, here too. I don't want to go into every little thing. We can look at it later. But the key point here that's not made in the first diagram is agriculture and rural development is central to achieving growth, equity, and stability. So we come back to those little farmers that we all look down upon, you know, to be a farmer, to be dumb, as to whatever. Well, why? Because they are poor. I mean, American farmers are not in that category at all. So that is the key point about that diagram, is to see the centrality of agriculture and rural development. Now I go to, oops. This is the question that has fascinated me professionally, is how do we change low productivity, subsistence agriculture into a high productivity successful agriculture? This is what my research has been. When I left the bank, I always said when I retired from the bank, that's the first thing I'm going to do. I'm going to see why we can't do it. In the bank, we do a lot of agricultural development, but it is so disappointing despite efforts from everybody. And I was just wondering why is it? People say, oh, you're the World Bank. You can do this. You can do that. But we can't transform agriculture. What's wrong with us? So when I looked into it, I became a lot more lenient on my evaluation of the bank. This is what I have looked at all the agriculture on which I could have data. So it's not all the world, but data is hard to come by. What is striking is I find as a strong pattern in all successful agricultural transformation. And that's the topic of my book. It's called Successful Agricultural Transformation. What it means and what makes it happen. Now, what does it mean? Success is an elastic term. Well, we mean two things. Number one, that there is productivity increase that stretches over decades. Not one year, not yo-yoing like this, not with the election cycle, but decades. 10 years, 20 years, 30 years, depending on the country. We can go into specific cases. Number two, we look at did that agricultural productivity actually help most of the people. By that we mean at least 50%. We look at the poverty level. We look at all kinds of socioeconomic indicators. Well, what is striking, which I actually learned. I did this research with another professor in the University of Maryland. We find that number one, all these countries had a stable framework of macroeconomic and political stability. You need stability for growth. This is the Asian Development Trilogy. You can't have growth if you have wars and ups and downs and all this excitement. It doesn't work. Number two, you need an effective technology transfer system. We just heard how much emphasis UAE is putting. Technology is key. Without technology you're just digging the old way and we can't afford the old way anymore. We just can't afford it. So an effective transfer system means research, means funding research, means extending it to farmers and means doing it decades and decades. That's the weak part of most government. They do it and then they forget it or whatever happens to them. Then access to lucrative markets. That makes sense. Why would you produce so many potatoes when they're all rot? High productivity must go with markets. So when you look at these conditions, they all interact and support each other. The fourth one, which is also very, very important, is an ownership system including a system of use rights that rewards individual initiative and toil. I remember discussing this with my colleagues at the World Bank. They say, Isabel, that is obvious. Yes, it is obvious. Every single one is obvious. But it's not obvious why so many governments cannot do it. What's going on? So the political economy of transformation is critical. And the fifth condition is employment creating non-agricultural sectors, which tells you that agriculture cannot grow if the entire economy is not growing. To whom are you going to sell? We heard in the discussion yesterday when President Kagame was there, well, Africa has to industrialize. We all have to industrialize. But you have to transform your agriculture first. This is what the French call passage obligé. You can't leap forward. And we can talk later about China who tried to leap forward. And what happened? Just boom, nothing happened. So you see these five conditions are essential. The key thing to remember is all five must maintain, not just one, not just two, not just now, not just then. And that is really heavy lifting. So I shall stop here. I know I've only scratched the surface of an enormous issue. And I hope, you know, bring up your questions or whatever. I'll be more than happy to discuss with you. Thank you. Thank you very much, Isabelle.