 We are entering into a period of time with lots of very large fluctuations in food prices, both in the global market, in the world market, and at the national level in various developing countries. That's because of the extreme weather events that are closely associated with climate change. Along with that comes, of course, reductions of fluctuations in production, which will be translated into fluctuations in food prices. And when these things begin to happen, governments take action sometimes to make the matters worse. If prices are on their way up because of production shortfalls in certain areas due to climate change, governments may push the prices up further by doing certain things like procuring food from the market. Governors get into the picture saying, oh, I have money to invest in food in the futures market because it looks like food prices are going to continue to go up, so let me jump in. That would push the prices up further. So there's a group, there's a bunch of things that together will push up food prices until such time that everybody agrees that it's too high and then it will come back down at a very rapid rate. You got these price fluctuations now that are much worse than they used to be in the past. That started in 2007, in the middle of 2007. We saw the first price spike. Rice prices tripled in a matter of seven to eight months. Wheat and corn prices or wheat and maize prices increased at a very rapid rate as well until the middle of 2008 at which point they all came down very, very quickly. We needed to understand not only how governments would react to these kinds of new prices, volatility, but also why they would react the way they did. How did governments respond and why? What are the interest groups or the lobby groups that will influence the policy process in such a way that you end up with a set of policies? What is the power of the government vis-à-vis certain lobby groups and so on? So we're looking at this whole complex set of issues in order to better understand the policy process and how that process is influenced. If we understand how governments respond or rather how governments responded in the past, we can begin to predict how they would respond this time and we can help governments respond differently to achieve the goals that they set for themselves. Well, first of all, I think if you really want to understand how policies are put in place, how they are designed and how they implement it, you have to do case studies. If you don't do case studies, you end up with more superficial information, knowledge that doesn't really get to the bottom of the problem. So by doing a set of case studies, you can then synthesize the results across the case studies. You are more likely to come up with something that's useful for predicting future policies and advising governments. We started out with identifying 18 developing countries as well as the European Union and the United States and those 18 developing countries were picked to get diversity. We wanted traditional exporters, food exporters, traditional food importers, self-sufficient countries, landlocked countries. We wanted countries from Africa, Asia and Latin America. So we wanted diversity in the selection of cases. We then grouped the countries according to their characteristics and then picked countries from each of those groups. Now comes the difficult one. How do you find the researchers in those countries who are willing to work with us and who can do this kind of research? Because we didn't want to sit in Helsinki or Ithaca, New York or anywhere else to do the study on these countries. The studies had to be done in the countries themselves by people in those countries. And selecting those people was more an art than a science. We didn't have a randomized experimental design. We couldn't quite figure out how to make that work. So instead we looked at our networks, the wider network, the Cornell University Network. We got names from the International Food Policy Research Institute in Washington, D.C. They of course have networks. And we simply put together a group of people that we thought would be ideal for the study. We approached those people. Most of them said yes, a few said no. We had the first workshop where we brought everybody together. And after that first workshop, which was used to set the agenda for the study, if you like the content of the study, we agreed on the methodology. But after that we lost four of the 18 developing countries. The four left us for whatever reason. So we ended up with 14 developing countries and the EU and the US and of course they stuck with us. So if your question is how do you select such an outstanding network of researchers or how do you select a network of such outstanding researchers, it takes prior knowledge. You have to work with the networks that you have and you just hope that you haven't overlooked people that really should be in there. We ended up with an outstanding group of people. They all did excellent research. We worked together. We had three workshops during this two and a half years of study. And we worked very, very closely together throughout. We all learned a lot. This was not a training exercise, but we all learned. Whether you're from a developing country or you're from a so-called developed country, we all learned from this kind of teamwork. We know a lot more now about why governments respond to food price volatility the way they do. We also learned quite a bit about how they responded, but that information you could get from other sources. The information we got about why they responded the way we did is really not available for many of the source. It is tricky to get this information because there's a lot of sensitivity involved. Is one interest group more influential than another interest group? What about the various ministries in the government? Do they work together or do they have competing goals? And do they, in fact, in some way introduce conflicts into the government? Those things are very sensitive, and they can only be researched by people who are close to the government and to these lobby groups. You can't get this information if you're flying from Helsinki or Ithaca or Washington. You have to be on the ground. What we did to help the researchers in the various countries get access to this kind of data was we had a component in the project that would make it possible to have either a current or more appropriately a former policymaker, a politician if you want to use that term, who understood how the system worked and who had access to the policymakers of today. And by working together, the researcher in the country and this former policymaker, they could actually get access to information that we would otherwise not be able to get. Now, there were limits to that. We wanted to understand to what extent corruption was involved in policymaking. And we had to let that one go because the people we work with in those countries would like to stay in their countries, and they would not necessarily want to go to jail for doing research. So we didn't get very far on the corruption. So we know from anecdotal evidence that there was corruption going on, but we don't have any structured research to document that. I don't think that's a major fault in the project. It's just a reality. You can't ask a researcher in the country to expose a minister who may be corrupt. It was an opportunity to use a natural experiment to generate the kind of knowledge that we badly need. We don't know whether such an opportunity comes about again. Unfortunately, it probably will. We will have another price spike. We don't know when it's going to happen. So this was an opportunity to actually generate the knowledge that would be useful for future decision-making. It's the information that was collected beginning in 2007 now outdated? No. Unfortunately, it's not. I wish it were. I wish the world had moved ahead and everybody was more enlightened now, but I'm afraid that's not the case. So no, that kind of research isn't outdated after a few years. If we have another price spike, hopefully somebody will do another set of studies and we need to continue to update this. But no, this book is going to be timely for quite some time to come. It is very much a hallmark of wider, that is the way wider operates. And of course, as part of these network efforts, these team efforts, you are learning from each other. Now, this is very different from bringing somebody into a university and giving them a degree. This is learning by doing. And the people that wider works with in most cases are already at a level where they have learned the basics, but by working together you can learn from each other and it doesn't matter what kind of degree or what kind of experience you have, you can always learn more from working in teams. So yes, I think that is the hallmark of wider. And I think it's a hallmark that should be maintained. Well, wider is doing extremely well. It has produced a tremendous amount of good knowledge. It has contributed to a very large extent to training of people, both in developing countries and well, training everybody who has been involved in that. Wider's approach to create networks and have team efforts I think is the approach that needs to be continued. I'm impressed to see the tremendous growth in wider, both in terms of quantity and quality under the current director during the last few years. I would like that trend to continue. I think wider can become larger, but not too large because it has tremendous benefits from being a small and well-organized and well-led organization. And sometimes when organizations grow too fast, they lose some of these good characteristics. So my advice to wider, keep it up. You can grow a bit more and keep up the quality that you have shown that you can generate. I don't think you need to make major changes.