 So actually, I'm in a departure from my usual efforts to be very analytical and empirical, try to be a little bit more of a storyteller today. And that's partially inspired by the topic, or my lack of confidence or competency in the topic, that of emergencies and crises. So actually, vis-à-vis my following in the footsteps of Pair, when I think about a crisis, when it was 30 or so years ago that Pair offered me my first real job working at IFPRE with him or for him, but he never made it feel like it was for him. He always made it feel it was with him, one of his great managerial, many of his managerial skills that I've failed to quite figure out how to emulate. When we sat many hours, many days, many years together, not just Pair and I, but the group of researchers and researchers at IFPRE, and we talked about our commitment and were inspired by Pair's commitment and determination to address problems of world hunger and malnutrition and the ethical urgency of doing so, I don't think we ever use the term emergency or crisis in the sense that when the phone rings and one of your kids fell down when they were young or when the phone rings and one of your parents is ill, when you're older or whatever these crises and emergencies are in your lives or in the lives of other. When I think about a crisis, I think about an acute urgent situation for which there is a lack of time to plan, to consider the best course of action always, and to try to figure out a way of moving forward in as muddled of a fashion as possible to address the urgency of the problem. But instead, the work that we did at IFPRE and I've continued to try to do throughout my career, again, following as best as I can through the early inspiration of Pair's work, is to look at causes and solutions to problems of hunger, such as improving health infrastructure, technological change in agriculture, increasing and improving mother's education, breaking into generational poverty traps and the cycle of poverty across generations, investing in the types of services and human capital and physical capital that will enable us to break the grips of chronic poverty, chronic hunger, chronic malnutrition over decades, if not generations. And one thing I don't take any personal pride in but personal satisfaction is possibly a better way of putting it is that as a global community, we have succeeded in doing that. Levels of malnutrition are nearly half of what they were in the 1990s. The percentage of children who are hungry and malnutrition every day, malnourished, who go to sleep every day without enough food has declined dramatically. So when Finn and Tony approached me about participating in this meeting, I actually sat and thought long and hard about, well, what do I know about crises? I have devoted my career and my life to not approaching problems of hunger and malnutrition in a crisis mode, but in a rather methodical way that involves spending years designing surveys, years collecting data, years doing models, and so forth. That doesn't sound like a crisis to me. So what is a crisis and what is an emergency? And is there really a big difference between what we call crises and emergencies? Nutrition and emergencies responding to crises as the title of the session is from the type of work that I've been doing, that Pair has been doing, that others in this room have been doing. So I actually, as a point of departure, I have to go to the next slide. I started thinking about what are these crises and how do we put them in a historical context. So of course, I wasn't alive when Malthus was writing his great treatises in the 18th century. I don't think anybody here was, as far as I could tell. But most of you are very aware and knowledgeable about how, back several hundred years ago, Malthus could not envision the amazing strides in terms of technological change in agriculture, things like the Green Revolution, the Biotech Revolution, and so forth. And he envisioned, as did many people, or most people at his time, who are witnessing the increase in the population growth, massive famines, inevitably causing a break on the growth of population and killing large shares of the world's population as a result of food production not being able to keep up with population growth. Now, of course, the amazing work of dedicated scientists, policymakers, institutions like the CGIAR, people like Pear and others in this room, looking back at Malthus seemed like he was living in a, or his conception of reality was completely divorced from what was to follow in the centuries that followed. But that being said, while Malthus proved to be completely off base and completely incorrect, by the mid-20th century, we were facing massive famines. And these massive famines, such as the Great Famines in Asia particularly, or in China in 1958 that killed over 30 million people, that's what I would call a crisis, an emergency, an acute one and extreme one. But at that same time, a number of very wise, thoughtful people such as Erlich in his work started echoing again the ideas of Malthus, saying, well, we've made great progress in agriculture, but look what's going on now. We have these massive great famines, food shortages, and yeah, Malthus after all was correct. Well, then of course, came along Amartya Sen, much of his thinking and thinking of his people such as Amartya, who introduced ideas around the capabilities approach, entitlement failures to understand human deprivation and famine. And really, he redefined those causes of those famines, not in terms of food shortages, which was the idea of the time. In the 1960s, 1970s, people were talking about famine equals food shortages with great deal of regularity. And he redefined kind of the underlying causes of these great famines that were at the time in the middle of the 20th century being defined in terms of food shortages. But then the notion of what is a crisis and the nature of emergencies continue to evolve, or at least this is my take on what's been going on over the past few centuries. And in the late 20th century, particularly, once again, we started to see the emergence of a new type or a new set of crises, particularly in Africa and the Horn of Africa, exemplified by the events in Ethiopia, which again, reintroduced the idea of food shortages, but primarily in the context of things like drought and the stresses of the growth of population in these areas on the agro-economic climate in which people were living. And in fact, it became less clear even at that time when we go back and look at these great famines in Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa, some of the analysis seemed to fall short in terms of explaining these things. It really wasn't just a matter of entitlement failures. And so we started to rethink what were the causes of these famines. But very soon, and not very soon, but 20, 30, 40 years later as we entered into the 21st century, the nature of nutrition emergencies seemed to have changed once again, or the paradigm for analyzing and understanding them. And they seem to transform into these within-state, drought-induced or even conflict-induced emergencies into emergencies that affect the refugees and displaced people in failed states, more along the lines of what we were hearing this morning from our plenary speaker, Elizabeth Reigns, in her discussion of migration, refugees, migrants, conflict. And increasingly, we have seen this emergence, particularly in the past 10 years, five years, even more so, of this acute increase in the number of people caught in between war, conflict, many of which have already left their countries. And if they are in their countries, they're displaced people. And there's been an exponential increase in the number of refugees and displaced people who are suffering serious hunger and malnutrition problems that have really taken on the forefront in terms of the fight against hunger and malnutrition. And it has a very different texture to it than earlier famines and other food shortages that occurred, whether it be in India and China or even in sub-Saharan Africa in the end of the 20th century. And the numbers in this regard are startling. They're quite remarkable. In 2016, over 65 million people were displaced, all confronting the threat of hunger and malnutrition. And over half of those people are children. The numbers are 1 in 113 people worldwide are displaced by conflict and persecution. These numbers are staggering. They're nothing like anything we've seen in history and or at least modern history. I can't quite speak to the Middle Ages. And the question is why? And I think there are two answers in terms of just simple short answers, which is that conflicts that were often resolved or famine situations that were often resolved over the course of two or three years as rain returned or as drought conditions diminished or as some internal conflict in a country abated. Well, they seem to be lasting and persistent. So problems in places like Somalia and Afghanistan, instead of being two, three-year problems, they're decade-old problems. And then, of course, we have the other issue of new conflicts and an increasing number of new conflicts over the past five years, whether that be in South Sudan, Ukraine, and, of course, Syria. So our challenge now in terms of when we have to confront nutrition emergencies is really addressing primarily the needs of internally and increasingly internationally displaced people, where there's a diminished role of the state, the diminished role of the types of institutions that we used to think about working through. So for example, when there was a famine in India in the 20th century, we thought about what's the role of the Food Corporation of India? What's the role of government subsidies? What's the role of investing the government working to improve storage and access? Well, that's less the discussion now. Now it's more, how are we going to deal with this? How are the NGOs going to respond? How are the international organizations like the World Food Program going to bring in food from outside and distribute it? How are indigenous institutions and camps and going to organize themselves to address these problems? So the whole texture of the problem of nutrition emergencies is completely different now than it was 10 years ago, 20 years ago, and certainly 50 years ago. And it presents new challenges. Now trying to tie a little bit of that together with the chronic story, one of the issues or one of the challenges that's emerged is because these nutrition emergencies have fallen in the lap of the international community. Donors are doing their best at doing, I would say, while certainly inadequate or remarkably good job at responding to these emergencies, but there's a cost. And the cost is that the investment, the resources that are going into emergency nutrition programs now are dwarfing the amount of money being allocated to the non-emergencies, the type of stuff that I thought I would spend my life working on. And the demands of these emergency nutrition programs are growing rapidly in magnitude and the amount of funds being allocated to them are growing rapidly in magnitude unlike the rest of the type of normal nutrition interventions nutrition programs scaling up the types of things that work that are being neglected because resources are scarce and they're being pushed forward into or redirected into these emergency situations. So just to give you a factoid to kind of illustrate this that I found is that the World Food Program emergency operations increase from 55,000 to 4 million individuals from 2008 to 2015 in that five-year period alone. So it really is a major shift in terms of the use of resources and the perceived needs in terms of combating malnutrition from these and one of my concerns and I'm not gonna have a lot of time to although I have actually quite a bit to say about this and many other things as you might imagine is that the emergency programming and the emergency activities because they're deemed emergencies and they're deemed critical without time to prepare to think, to organize, to collect data, to do research and so forth are subject to far less scrutiny in terms of evaluation, in terms of economic analysis, in terms of assessing impact. So we know a lot less about what works and what doesn't work and why it works and we are in one sense operating in the dark and I won't get to my final slides but one of my main concerns or major concerns is that we don't have the evidence, we don't have the knowledge and certainly the type of people that I know who have spent their careers and even now in terms of students and areas of study that are focusing on ameliorating problems of hunger and malnutrition. They're not doing it in these contexts. They're not evaluating programs, they're not doing RCTs, they're not doing anything, they're not doing any models, they're not doing anything that we've spent our careers talking about doing and saying needs to be done for looking at nutrition programming, it's completely off the agenda in the emergency context. To me, this is a real big problem. So I started thinking more about what are the dimensions of these emergency programs and I wanna highlight a few of them and then try to make a few more remarks before my time is out and maybe we can come back to this during the question and answer period. So when we think about these emergency programs, the four dimensions that I thought about that may be worth considering in a little bit more detail but I'll just throw them out there or some of them are very prominent and highly visible. And the degree of prominence and visibility, I would argue, is what defines the nature of the response, not necessarily and the degree of prominence and visibility is not necessarily correlated with the degree of need. And I think this is a very important issue. You know, when we go in and we try to intervene in a kind of a normal, quote unquote, normal development context, we think about needs and then we think about designing programs and policies that respond or address the neediest populations. Well, in the case of emergencies, it's prominence and visibility but that's not necessarily correlated with real need. So there may be parts of the Central African Republic, for example, where prominence and visibility is low but need is astronomical but they're just not getting the types of attention and resources. This is a big problem. Another element is that of duration. Now I alluded to this earlier that we have this odd situation that these nutrition emergencies seem to go on forever now. People are on camps for decades, for generations. Well, but we're still calling them emergencies but really aren't they chronic situations and shouldn't we be doing the type of careful analytical work and design work in those contexts that we would do if we go into communities in Northern Kenya or in Tanzania or in Latin America where we have populations of undernourished people and we do careful analytical work, design things, make sure they work, evaluate their impact, talk about how do we make them sustainable, how do we involve the communities but if you're in a camp in Somalia for 25 years or in Sudan for generation after generation, no, it's an emergency. All we have to do is throw the food in and we're doing the job. I don't think that's right. And then we have this issue of whether it's an internally stable versus internationally displaced population. Of course that has tremendous implications for how we again think about responding and what can be the response in terms of addressing the nutrition problems. And I'm just gonna not expand on that further but there's also this degree of destruction of systems and infrastructure. Now we spend a lot of time when we're dealing with chronic malnutrition problems talking about we've got to set up health systems, we've got to improve infrastructure so that markets function better. We have to provide for water and sanitation. But the reality is that in, especially amongst internationally displaced people, the whole opportunity to respond in this way is often absent for a number of complex reasons and they can involve the host governments. They don't want the infrastructure built there because they don't want these people hanging around too long but it also could be because there aren't the institutions, there's no governance structure. And it's also again, the nature of the mentality when you respond to an emergency, truck in the water, truck in the latrine, right? But don't think about rebuilding the infrastructure. So these are complicated distinctions that in fact, at the end of the day, the most, as I say here, the most important distinction between an emergency and a non-emergency situation really is the dimension of suddenness. But an emergencies because they're can supposedly sudden, I don't mean to diminish this or sound too harsh but there's almost like this excuse that people are dying, we've got to do whatever it takes, right? I mean, we got an emergency, we got to respond, we got to be jolly on the spot, get all the resources in there. We don't have to worry about if this is efficient, effective, sustainable because there's a life-threatening problem. But what about the chronic malnutrition? Which is, I ensure you just by the numbers. There are a lot more kids who die every day by orders of magnitude as a result of chronic malnutrition where we always have to talk about promoting sustainability, evidence-braced approaches, considering opportunity costs, negative externalities, priority setting and so forth. But in the emergency context, this stuff is, I won't say ignored but considered a second order problem, a luxury to think about. But is it really a luxury in that context but not in the context of all the 250 million years in children who are suffering malnutrition? The hundreds of millions of kids who are iodine deficient, the 250 million kids who are iron deficient, who are not considered the emergency population that we need to worry about? So I'm going to just at the end of the day, conclude, because again, we're short on time and like to hear from you, is that chronic malnutrition, whether it's stunting, micronutrient deficiencies and so forth, and increasingly even obesity, I would argue, represent a silent emergency greater in scope than the acutely malnourished that we try to conjure up in our minds or unfortunately not just conjure up in our minds, but that are all too horrible to consider in the context of these emergencies that we're trying to respond to in amongst displaced people, people affected by war drought, bad governments. But we are facing this serious competition for resources. And the perception is that emergencies can't wait, but chronic malnutrition can. And that we first need to deal with the humanitarian crisis and we can wait on the rest of this. And that's what's going on now in the world in terms of the allocation of effort, time and resources. And it worries me. And I'm not sure how to reconcile this because there is no good answer. But let me finally go back one slide, sorry guys. And that is as an economist, I've been thinking, or as a researcher, really, what is the role of economic policy research? What can we do better? And I think what we should try to move away from is the excuse that is ignoring in the emergency context traditional areas of evidence-based economic research, including evaluation, which are far more limited in scope. And as I said, that we put a higher standard in terms of dealing with chronic nutrition problems. So there may not always be time for RCTs and there may not always be time for collecting good observational and baseline data and worrying about models that have proper identification and good instruments or all the other stuff that we spend our time thinking about. But I don't think the situation is that dire in the sense that not that people aren't suffering, but I think a good creative effort on the part of the research community could help formulate a research agenda around emergency responses and economic, and of course I'm thinking more in terms of not a political, the role of political scientists or logistics people or all sorts of other areas that I know nothing about. But in terms of even economic analysis about looking at how to make responses to emergency situations be a level or a standard that is somewhat consistent with what we would expect for ourselves in responding to more chronic and long-term problems. So thanks very much.