 Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be able to present to you in particular your indulgence in allowing me to do this online as I wasn't able to come to Helsinki. I'm grateful for the assistance wider has given me over several years. And in particular the the work I did with one of the other panelists pair, Princeton Anderson on food policy as well as the work that wider supported looking at foreign assistance to agriculture, which is why I was asked to give this particular presentation. I want to begin with some background. Okay, I want to begin with some background and what's happened to foreign assistance to agriculture over time, because there's a marked important trend that reversed somewhat around 2008 at the time of the commodity price spikes and that we sometimes call the food crisis then and again in 2011. But there's been over time a noticeable decline in assistance given to agriculture. The peak was at 20% of total overseas development assistance in 1983. And it fell to a minimum of 3.7% in 2006. This is assistance to agriculture. And in addition, there's another category measured in ODA called developmental food aid or food security assistance. And that was another 7.5% of ODA in 1984. So in the mid 80s, assistance to agriculture and food security was over a quarter of development assistance that fell to 1% in 2006. The developmental food aid part of it making overall assistance under 5% at that time. There are a number of measurement issues associated with this data included aggregation of egg forestry and fisheries data prior to 1995 and how you count humanitarian food aid of which much of developmental food aid is considered. And there's an excellent discussion of this by Neural Islam from IFPRI in 2011. If you want to know what all the different categories of this are about and some of the problems in interpreting the data, I strongly recommend this paper. This is the data from the OECD showing the trends over time, showing the spike in developmental food aid around the late 1960s. And then the decline of that over time to a plateau that was, as I said, about 3% in 2006. We see the blue line in this graph is agriculture and forestry and fisheries aid, which peaked around 1983 and declined rapidly until about 2003. It leveled off then and then we see some increase after about 2006. Why did this happen? What was the decline in aid to agriculture the result of? I think it's fair to say that many products either failed or experienced only limited success over much of this history. Resources as a result went to more successful population health and education interventions. Some believe this is because agriculture involves many small highly competitive private entities and it's quite difficult to intervene to improve the lot of those entities to reach all of the actors that might be involved. It's a lot easier to build a school or to build a health center in a village than to reach lots of farmers living in dispersed areas. Another issue is the consequence of structural transformation, an important issue that another one of the panelists will talk about and that will be important as I look at what we might consider in the future. Some economic models have de-emphasized agriculture since the primary work of Lewis and many economists still believe that the government service industries and as a result foreign aid to agriculture is not a priority. Also the importance of agriculture in transitioning economies has declined. This has led to people to choose not to support agriculture as much as other activities. The city's taxes and the peristals, the public organizations involved and markets have distorted those markets and very importantly there are missing markets, particularly things like credit and input markets for agriculture and their governance and policy failures. The World Bank has strongly emphasized these latter two factors, the missing markets and the governance and policy failures as one of the principal reasons for the decline in foreign assistance to agriculture. It was somewhat of a change following the spike in commodity prices in 2007, 2008 and again in 2001. It brought huge promises of more aid and some actual increases. As I said, the low was 3.7 percent in 2006. In 2009 this jumped to 5.3 percent of ODA foreign assistance was 5.5 percent again in 2012 and the latest date is 2016 where it slipped to about 4.3 percent. Promises for this aid were large at the time. There were numerous international meetings including the World Food Summit in 2008 and the Laquia G8 summit in 2009 and at the Laquia Summit the G8 countries promised an additional 22 billion dollars in foreign assistance. There's always these promises that they looked at the details. This wasn't to occur in one year. At the time total foreign assistance tag was about four billion dollars and in 2007 it jumped to six billion dollars. Food security assistance at the time was about 1.4 billion. The promises were committed over several years. They did not prove to be additional. This is a list if you want to look later at a number of the kinds of initiatives that were taken and the amounts of money that were with some increase in food assistance and in agricultural development assistance following this crisis. This looks at the data over time of the various categories. Agriculture is the blue line. On this we see the decline to 2006. The ramp up and leveling off at a somewhat higher level after 2006 we see the decline in food aid and food security assistance over time with a brief jump in 2008 and then a decline and then a new category that emerged which is labeled basic nutrition was one of the new areas that we also see the trends in health education and population and population notably has been something that also has increased post 2007. As foreign assistance to agriculture declined and then increased the design of interventions has changed as people have looked at that they've seen numerous changes since say the 1970s when agriculture was trying to become important in the ways that we went about trying to improve agriculture changed a lot. It used to be the case that for resources were given to input and credit subsidies and fewer resources have gone to that area. There's less support for land and water augmentation things like building dams in the mid 1970s to the 1980s integrated rural development projects were pursued. These were believed to be complex and hard to implement and so we're not pursued and recently governance policies and institutions have been emphasized that are now part of public goods. Agriculture research is something that us ag economists at least have always thought was important and there's better recognition of that and there also exists a number of alternative development programs such as the use of cocoa instead of drugs as a way for rural populations to make a living. This graph comes from the OECD database and shows some of the different categories. Islam points out the categorization is not perfect to show what's going on. The brown line at the top is a category called development and policy and you see that it is somewhat erratic over time but much larger than the other categories and in particular in 2016 it's taking up nearly 60 percent of the ODA that is going to agriculture. The green line research which peaks around 2008 and always has been a bit erratic and has come down over time. The orange line shows inputs and we see since the mid 1990s that's been coming down. The 2008 crisis brought a peak in inputs as lots of countries wanted fertilizer subsidies as a strategy and then it settled back down to the level after somewhat below where it was before. The World Bank had anticipated this change in the nature of foreign assistance to agriculture and in its 2008 world development report it devoted that to agriculture and I thought what was interesting is this was prior to the 0708 crisis and they advocated increased investment in agriculture ahead of those crisis. It also provided a framework for subsequent interventions based on past experience. This is where the notion that probably drives the current design of foreign assistance to agriculture that emerged and that was that they said that much of the failure was due to past governance and policy failures and if foreign assistance was to work we needed a much improved policy environment. The emphasized market access and value chains that the nature of the markets was critical that small holder competitiveness was critical that employment needed to be emphasized in both non-farm and farm activities and these had to lead to improved liability for the assistance of farm. This is a diagram taken from that report showing the various ways in which they thought that agriculture could matter. There are a number of new not entirely new but more heavily emphasized initiatives and concepts that I wanted to point out. As always when you look at foreign assistance and you look at government intervention emphasis is placed on public goods and in the case since it's both global and national public goods and this is not just technology and infrastructure but I think the emphasis on institutions as a public good is one of the important features of foreign assistance initiatives afterwards. Policy regulation and governance are all seen as public goods. Value chains have been emphasized we look at inputs markets and institutions and not just what's going on on the farm and these have tended to emphasize exports and higher value added goods. As I noted earlier nutrition interventions have become important and there are at least two ways to look at these. A lot of nutrition interventions target vulnerable groups particularly mothers and young children and so maternal and child health interventions are important but also there's a dimension of nutrition sensitive agriculture where people with knowledge about nutrition try and inform interventions. Scaling up has become an issue it's become apparent that there's technologies available to improve agriculture and we know how to descend on a village and improve the lot of smallholder farmers in that village but getting interventions to matter to large populations is difficult and I think the other concept that's important is public-private partnerships leading to another topic I was asked to address in this which is the role of foreign investment and all of this and let me just talk about that in this case. In many developing countries foreign aid has been a huge part of a country's agricultural development budget that the amount of money that government spends and the amount that's invested in agricultural development at least for public goods there are numerous cases in Africa where foreign aid can be more than 80 percent of the agricultural budget in a country. The scare in 2007-08 led to a discussion about whether or not agriculture can feed the addition more than 9 billion people expected in 2050 and noted this will require substantially increased resources to meet that production. To put this in perspective the FAO did an estimate when they said that there would be need to be an additional 83 billion dollars invested in agriculture in developing countries based on a current 142 billion dollars invested and right now foreign aid and FDI are each about 10 billion dollars much of that investment's private domestic investment and one of the points was you'd never get enough resources from foreign aid to meet the investment needs that are required and the hope was that the portion coming from the private sector in particular from FDI could be increased substantially. This has led to much emphasis on public-private partnerships and leveraging private investment it's difficult to find ways to do this for small holders the issue I raised earlier as to what agriculture has been a problem so at least my assessment is that there's lots of talk about this and lots of discussions of the issues involved and trying to implement in public private partnerships but they've proven somewhat difficult to implement over time. That said multinationals have been in a long history of being involved in agriculture more so in export industries than in other industries and much of my experiences in Africa working on cocoa under an extent Latin America as well and there's a long history of multinationals involved in that area but one of the things striking is the limited penetration inside borders of those countries. They set up shop in the ports and sometimes intervene in markets but have limited involvement of farm and much of the value chain. I think I'm going to skip that over time. I was asked to comment on wider and how it affects this. Widers themes for successful agricultural development are transformation that inclusion and sustainability and these are both keys to successful agricultural development. One of the issues for those of us in agriculture dates back to the Lewis controversy people now believe that agriculture particularly in Africa should be playing a leading role in economic growth and this is an area that I think needs more work and attention in the future and hopefully one of the other panelists will discuss more that issue. Inclusion, agriculture growth and poverty reduction. The notion is that while agriculture may not lead to the most rapid economic growth that involves agriculture is led by agriculture tends to lead to greater poverty reduction and agriculture also involves safety nets and then sustainability agriculture is an important component of adaptation to climate change. I think in the interest of time there are a number of wider projects that address these as they've noted earlier a big component of agri-culture now is in the form of policy and a major project directed by para-print strip. Anderson looked at a number of studies to ask how did they react to this food crisis in 2007 and 2008 what policies were put in place. This is a good work to understand what happened and the difference in priorities of donors versus governments in recipient countries. The donors were interested in long-term ag development and safety nets and the governments were interested in boosting production in the short term through input subsidies and the like and broad consumer protection. There's also been a considerable amount of work at wider looking at aid effectiveness and this contributed to one of the pieces I was able to work on looking at how foreign assistance played a role in the crisis and how it might have evolved afterwards. This is done under the Recon Research and Communication to Foreign Aid project and as you can see on this slide there were a number of other activities in there as well. There's also been a project by Art McKay and Tarp under the Reconselling Act called Africa's Growth, Poverty and Inequality Trends and they looked at 16 case studies and asked how policy reform and institution building was working in those cases and I think this is an example of something that needs to be followed up on and done more often because this is one of the keys to improving agricultural assistance. Then there's a project under Development and Climate Change by Art, Farmers, State, Surab and Thurlow which is another area that Wider's been working. In addition in the project on New Directions and Development Policy, Lou Kredes and colleagues have looked at a number of roles. He explores a concept that's interesting that says agriculture is good for raising dollar a day or reducing dollar a day poverty but it becomes less effective when the goal is $2 a day poverty. It can raise poverty levels at the various lowest levels but then their limits to how far that goes and this is related to this structural transformation issue. We needed to worry about and then there's work on the political economy of social protection systems. Much of the work at Wider's been in Latin America and the two key cases are probably Brazil and Ethiopia which are contrasts in a debate that exists between whether or not cash transfers can replace food aid as social safety. I want to make just a few observations about effectiveness of food aid and then think about what that means for a research agenda moving forward. First of all, local small-scale interventions are well understood and can be quite successful. I think of the Millenellin villages in the Green Rail in Africa of the Ford Foundation. We've learned from these and from other work that off-the-shelf technologies exist now and we don't necessarily need new technology to improve the lot of small farmers in Africa but we need to make better use of the technology that exists. When these interventions come to a village they bring institutions and markets along with technology and while you can easily intervene at village levels, scaling that up to matter at a national level is quite challenging. In terms of value chains they're important because they emphasize not just on farm initiatives but market development. They also emphasize higher value in exported products and in some work I've done. Sometimes the targets are probably not as realistic as they might be and this leads to the fact that while there have been some great successes, think flowers out of Kenya or green beans out of Senegal but many of the value chain efforts have not been at all cost effective. The fertilizer subsidies I mentioned, this has been less important to donors and it remains something that governments think are important and it was part of their agenda over the last decade. I want to mention the challenge of structural transformation. Can we lead economic growth with interventions and investments in agriculture and how will employment evolve in the meantime? I think it's right that ag growth may benefit the extreme poor but as a wider study has emphasized it's less effective relieving $2 poverty a day. When those of us study ag policy look at its evolution over time we attribute many of the institutions that arise and develop country agriculture to the problems of the structural transformation and the release of labor from agriculture over time. Can that be avoided or not? A related issue is what's now referred to as the greening of poverty we've known for a long time that if you go to an area and increase production dramatically prices can collapse and intervention agriculture mostly benefit consumers. As I mentioned in public-private partnerships there's more talk than action and the study is that I reviewed provided little assessment of the scope and success of activities. Let me just conclude by saying that one of the initiatives has been to try and improve governance and this has been going on since the Maputo Declaration in 2003 where governments in Africa committed to spend 10% of their resources on agriculture and only 10 of 47 cadet members do that. This was repeated in Malibu and that still hasn't happened. Okay so I think going forward I would emphasize two agendas where wider can play an important role. One is this question of structural transformation is agriculture a lot of growth realistic? How do you deal with employment and poverty along the way and can you leapfrog the ag policy history that structural transformation has led to? And the other issue is the heavy emphasis on policy governments and institutions are reforms working can we improve institutions to form aid or decisions taken by some donors to only give aid to countries that are well governed an appropriate role and what role does policy play in climate change? I think I'll stop there. Thank you very much.