 was asked to reflect on my experiences of the past 20 years working on issues related to research, indigenous knowledge, food sovereignty, agroecology. So it's all right here. These are just very preliminary reflections when I look back over the last 20 years. So I was, when speaking with Vincent Alexandre, they asked me to speak about, you know, what kind of public research, for example, do we need for sustainable food systems? And when I considered this, I thought, well, knowing to some extent the FTA community, at least as an outsider, but still knowing the kind of work that you do, I think probably most of you have a quite good idea of what kind of research we need. And it's already been alluded to in terms of transdisciplinary approaches, systems thinking, and so on. And I think that in the last few years building on, of course, decades of work on, you know, first interdisciplinary, then multidisciplinary, then participatory research, I think that we have quite a good idea, or enough of a good idea of what kinds of research need to be done. Of course, there's always more thinking that needs to be added. When I thought about this, I thought probably what stands out to me in my experience, in terms of what's perhaps lacking in terms of our thinking and our reflection, is what are the challenges that this type of research faces in terms of getting more support? And also what to do about it? I think this, for me, what to do about it is really where the research community, in my experience, perhaps needs to focus a bit more attention. So in terms of transdisciplinary approaches, as I mentioned, I think there's more and more talk about it in the circles that I work in, in FAO, in the Committee on World Food Security, for example, especially since 2014 when agroecology became an issue that was discussed at the international level in FAO. At the same time, transdisciplinary approaches were always associated with agroecology. And so that got more attention to the issue. In terms of getting actual funding and political backing, as you know, the situation is different. And here I'll refer to work that's been done by colleagues of mine and myself at EPS Food, which Vincent mentioned. Recently, we published an open letter on the OneCGIR reform. And in that, and another report that we did on money flows in research systems, we said that, for example, the CG system does not seem to be rising to the challenge of taking these transdisciplinary approaches with the notable exceptions of the work of the FDA and so on. But a 2017 study concluded that the CGIR environment was not conducive to implementing systems research. Despite the introduction of the CRPs in 2008, and recent analysis by Biovision and EPS Food has found that on average, the CRPs meet less than 20% of the indicators of systemic agroecological research. The focus remains on scientific innovations being, and I quote, deployed faster at a larger scale and at a reduced cost, and provided to rather than developed with beneficiaries. The predominant focus of some CG centers on increasing the productivity of specific crops remains unchallenged. So why is it so challenging to promote systems approaches both within the CG and beyond? The EPS Food and also the HLPE under the leadership of Fergus and others have clearly articulated some of the key challenges, including donors focus on showing impact on very specific priorities, and short term goals and a lack of appropriate metrics. According to a recent EPS report, the patchy performance and fragmented goals of CGIR centers and programs reflect their dependence on specific donors who look for quick, tangible returns on investment and thus favors targeted technological solutions. Even the SDGs widely hailed for at last taking an integrated approach to global development goals failed to change the outlook of most donors. Even donors who are more open to both agroecology and trans disciplinary approaches, such as the Swiss, according to our findings, find it a challenge to include all relevant aspects of food systems. Agroecology is often reduced to the bio physical dimension and consequently donors like Switzerland pay less attention to concerns like the circular economy, local food webs, food cultures, and the co creation of knowledge with farmers and local communities. So what needs to be done to overcome some of these challenges? Organizations like EPS or the HLPE have outlined the kinds of things that need to happen, like changing the entire education and training system for scientists, redesigning incentives and research organizations and developing new metrics to show the systemic impacts of interventions. I think all of these and others are very useful and important ideas. And I think they're increasingly well articulated. So I'm not going to delve into some of those solutions. What what I think is is needs to be strengthened. Let's say, as I already mentioned, is is what do we do about it? And I think that questions of strategy need to be more a focus of our attention, our meaning like minded people who have an interest in in promoting interdisciplinary approaches, who is going to do what to get us there and how will organizations and groups and even individuals work together to achieve our aims? How will we coordinate our efforts? These are the types of things that I mean by strategy. In terms of working together, I think that one thing that stood out for me is that in my experience, it's been very, very important for researchers, scientists to work with civil society, including producer organizations and social movements and including the more politicized ones. I think that together, they bring a really powerful combination of knowledge and skills. And I think that we saw that very well in in terms of the interest in acroecology that I mentioned in FAO in the CFS, I think it's really, and a couple of countries who have also supported politically. But I think that it's these forces come into coming together have been very effective and need to work together more, I think. Some some reasons why I think it's important to work, especially with with not just with local knowledge, and the very local grassroots, but also the social movements, the more organized, large movements who tend to be political. I think that their knowledge is is and their perspectives and their experience in in strategizing and seeing political strategies are important. I look at the experience that I had as Vice Chair of the HLPE, for example, the high level panel of experts on food security and nutrition. There it was very clear to me that the knowledge aspect of the CFS, the Committee on Food Security, and the governance aspect, they went hand in glove together. The more if you want more participatory governance, you need more participatory forms of knowledge creation. And if you want, likewise, if you want support for transdisciplinary research, it would help to have government governance that is more participatory and more open. So also in the CFS, I think that that the the academics and the civil society have have sometimes worked extremely effectively together for common interests. I also found in my experience in the CFS and in the HLPE that researchers are are not very experienced in my experience in in this type of a bit more political strategizing. But their institutions are political entities and changing the way that they work. And the way that they're structured and the way that they're funded is a political act, I think. And I think that CSO activists can bring a lot of knowledge and experience on political strategizing to their allied researchers. I also think that it's very important. I mean, in my experience, speaking from from the point of view of someone who's worked a lot from civil society, we've worked a lot and it's been very important to work with researchers who who are like minded. But it was almost never an institutional arrangement. It was almost always individual like minded researchers who sort of carved out a little bit of their time to come to to do either to do research with us on the ground or to attend meetings where we would try to strategize. And I think that this this is a weakness that that the that the relations are not institutional that there's only so far that you can go with individual sympathetic researchers. We had a really amazing experience working with a network of social movements from around the world on asking how can we democratize agricultural research for food sovereignty? And we were engaged in things like citizens juries in West Africa and India to ask this question, what kind of agricultural research do farmers pastoralists for sure folk, what do they want? Using, you know, very what what I would consider to be transdisciplinary methodologies. You know, there was a lot of energy behind this kind of work 10 15 years ago. And I think while on the one hand, I think that agroecology has brought more attention and more interest in into transdisciplinary approaches. On the other hand, I've seen important research initiatives like the one I just mentioned, losing steam, you know, 10 years ago, 15 years ago, because, you know, research funding or project funding ran out. And also, because I think the researchers tended to be involved as individuals, they didn't have their institutional backing. And another another challenge that I've seen in terms of social movements working with researchers is that and also with institutions is is the question of the controversial issues that tend to come up. So in in topics that I've worked on these include GMOs, intellectual property rights, this the the role of the private sector in in research institutions in funding in governance. For example, in 2003, the at the time there was an NGO committee of the CGI or some of you may may know that. And they the NGO committee chose to freeze its relations with the CGI are temporarily for a year, I think it was to review its relations with the CGI are because they were they found it very untransparent and objection dimble. What the work the work of the CGI are on in some cases promoting in other cases not standing in front of GMOs in allowing IPRs to be taken out on germplasm that was in their public gene banks, the role of the private sector in the governance of the CGI are and that freeze of relations just never got fixed. And instead that NGO committee sort of just dissolved away. And I think I'm not exactly sure but I think the CGI then came up with other mechanisms for for being consultative. While including I think the less politicized organizations, the more docile ones if you like. So the thought that I'd like to end with is that I think that this fundamentally crucially important alliance between transdisciplinary scientists and social movements. One of the things that it needs to be successful is it needs a way to discuss controversial topics. Issues like GMOs and IPRs cannot be, we cannot allow them to sort of cause a rift between the two sides of this alliance. There needs to be a way to discuss and as I mentioned, I think the problems are not with indigenous individual scientists so much as with the institutions, but the institutions need to get engaged in these alliances and they need to have ways to to discuss these controversial topics without rupturing. Having a dialogue in which both sides feel that it's it's useful to continue in this dialogue. And I think that the topic that I don't know enough about I'd like to know more about but I think the topic that going forward will certainly reproduce all of the controversies that we've already seen on GMOs and so on and so forth is the issue of data. And I think that their transdisciplinary scientists need to put some attention on questions of data ownership are extremely controversial and control of the data. And I know that the CIGIR FAO and everyone who's involved in international development today wants to show how good they are at using big data. So I think that these questions are the questions that we have to have on their coming on the horizon or they're already here. But if we really want if we really believe that we need transdisciplinary approaches to tackle the complex problems the world has already always been complex I think we're just learning that our reductionist approaches are not appropriate. But if we want to do that I think we do need this alliance between researchers research institutions and social movements. We need to understand that this work of promoting transdisciplinary research is it upsets certain vested interests and it's therefore political. And we need to have ways of dealing with that and dealing with controversial issues and I would propose that if a transdisciplinary research approach cannot tackle these types of complex issues than what else can so I think we probably do have the tools or some of the tools that we need to do this kind of work. But as I said I in my experience I'm I'm happy to be proven wrong but in my experience researchers tend not to think about political strategies in terms of you know how do you influence this institution and that influence and the donors and so on and so forth. And I think that that's that's a kind of Achilles heel. So with my jet lag post covid travel two weeks of quarantine starting today I hope that that was coherent at least. Thank you very much.