 I'm Bob Ziegler, Director General of the International Rice Research Institute, and it's my great pleasure to welcome you to this DVD version of our 2008 annual report. Now 2008 was really an incredible year. It started off with a panic in rice prices. Rice prices internationally traded exceeded $1,000 a ton triple the price of just six months earlier. This caused of course severe hardship for the very poor who depend on rice for their basic food supplies. It did however have a positive side and that was to sharply remind governments that they'd taken their eye off the ball and failing to invest in research and development and infrastructure maintenance for for rice production and other staple foods. So in the dark cloud of high prices there was a silver lining to work to improve future prospects of food supply. 2008 also saw a financial crisis and that threatened to take government's eye off the ball of research and technology development. Fortunately all signs are that decision makers realize that for long-term food security investments in research and development, investments in infrastructure, investments in capacity building are all going to be required to assure our long-term food security. Now Erie of course is committed to achieving sustainable productivity growth and our research in 2008 proved to be very very successful. Erie is of course committed to maintaining global food security by maintaining productivity growth in rice. We're also focusing on difficult ecosystems where rice production is unreliable. Farmers are victim to the vagaries of weather changes and over the medium term and short-term events such as drought and flooding can cause them serious losses. 2008 marks the year where we rolled out an incredible technology that enables rice to withstand flooding for up to two or three weeks. Rice like any crop will drown if it's completely submerged for more than a few days but this new technology that we call the sub-one gene or submergence tolerance allows rice to to survive long periods of flooding and this will be a transformational technology. I don't think there's any question that 10 years from now when we look at the flood prone areas we will see lives of poor farmers dramatically improved because of this technology. Another major technological advance this year has been moving the development of golden rice or rice that's high in beta carotene the precursor of vitamin A. Moving that rice forward one more step towards its release. We're confident now that we have a golden rice technology that will produce high reliable levels of beta carotene that will in fact improve the diet of poor people who depend on rice for most of their calories. We've been working very hard with WADA the Africa Rice Center to improve productivity of rice in sub-Saharan Africa. Indeed we've worked closely with the Africa Rice Center and the government of Japan to launch a multi-million dollar program to increase the productivity of rice and especially build the capacity of African rice researchers so that they can lead the rice improvement effort. Major investments made by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation this year in rice research they have funded four major projects totaling over 60 million dollars to developing improved rice technologies for South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. This has enabled us to tremendously strengthen our partnerships with national programs and the Africa Rice Center. We're extremely proud of the confidence that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has shown in our work and we believe it's an indicator of the extremely high quality of work that our Institute continues to carry out even after almost 50 years of being in existence. We've already begun planning for our 50th anniversary. Erie in 2010 celebrates 50 years of incredibly effective research to improving the productivity of rice fields and improving the livelihood of rice farmers. We're looking forward to celebrating this golden anniversary with our national partners and our longtime supporters. While we've been extremely successful in our first 50 years there is no doubt in our mind that the world will continue to need a public sector institution devoted to the understanding and improvement of the rice plant and its interaction with the environment. The question is what will the nature of that research be that we will be carrying out and what will be the facilities that will be needed to do so? We can be certain that the revolutions and genomics and molecular biology and genetics will give us tools that we can barely imagine today that will allow us to tackle problems that were previously thought to be unsolvable. We will, however, need infrastructure, laboratories, and personnel to take advantage of the new tools that will be available. For that reason, the Institute is launching a major fundraising campaign to enable us to replace our greenhouse and growth facilities and renovate our laboratories as well as tap into the tremendous genetic diversity that we hold in international rice gene bank. I've gone on much longer than I intended to, but I just wanted to give you a little bit of a flavor of some of the tremendous findings and activities that you'll see summarized in this award-winning DVD format for our annual report. I wish you all the best and I am sure you will enjoy browsing through this report, so thank you very much.