 Badu raised the question of climate change and its potential impact, as was mentioned both Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, which have the large number of undernourished people are the region's most vulnerable to climate change, particularly warming by one or two degrees, being temperature rising by a degree or two. And our next speaker will show some way of how agriculture can increase its contribution to mitigation, not talking about adaptation, adaptation biodiversity. It's extremely important by mitigation both through carbon sequestration on one hand, through photosynthesis, the other building soil, carbon banks locking up, and also more carbon in the ocean. Those of you who are coming from Latin America know only too well. The ocean temperature, recently the Bolivian fisheries, millions of fishes died because the temperature went down from 14 degrees centigrade to about 3 degrees centigrade. So both in terms of fisheries as well as crop husbandry, we have great implications of climate change and Dr. Dennis Carrity will speak about the, how do you, under those conditions, how do you make agriculture ever green? Dennis? Well thank you very, very much Dr. Swaminathan. Today as we meet here in Des Moines on the other side of the world, as you mentioned, there is a meeting in progress of the parties to the Global Convention on Biodiversity. It's going on right now. They're assessing the world's progress in meeting the target that was established 10 years ago to stop the precipitous decline of biological diversity around the globe by 2010. I just read the results of that assessment and it's not an encouraging story. Biodiversity decline around the world hasn't been halted. Rather in most places, it has further accelerated during the past decade and the majority of those declines have been due to habitat conversion. That is forest clearing for farming. It is slowly dawned on the conservation community that small-holder farmers have a lot to do with conservation of biodiversity and that local biodiversity is also crucial to small-holders and livelihoods as well. Now the map that you see here shows the results of a recent global assessment of tree cover on agricultural lands. The results may be surprising to some of you. Today there is greater than 10% tree cover on half of the agricultural land in the world and in some regions, such as South East Asia and Central America, tree cover on agricultural land actually exceeds 30%. Well, that's a very interesting observation and it buttresses the good news that although tree cover in forests is still declining rapidly, the number of trees on farms is actually increasing. Unlike in the temperate areas, small-holder farmers in the tropics have always husbanded trees on the farms. They have a year-round growing season and they continue to culture them for a great variety of purposes. We call this evergreen agriculture, a form of more intensive farming that integrates trees with annual crops, maintaining a green cover on the land throughout the year. Evergreen farming systems feature both perennial and annual species that are producing food and income. Now, imagine for a moment a future where small-holder farmers and large farmers as well practice much of their food crop production under a full canopy of trees. Such as you see in this photo taken of a maize production system in the food bread basket zone of Tanzania. Imagine that these trees are not competing with the food crops, but rather quite the opposite. They are dramatically enhancing the yields of these crops due to their striking effects on soil fertility. They are nitrogen-fixing trees acting as fertilizer factories in the field, providing tons of nutrient-rich biomass year after year, decade after decade, since these trees live to be about 100 years old, with no investment cost to the farmer. These trees are fully compatible with the crops because they exhibit a unique physiological trait, reverse phenology. This trait triggers this particular species of trees to go dormant at the beginning of the crop season, when the rains occurred, and drop their leaf biomass as fertilizer to the crops growing in their vicinity. Imagine that producing food crops like maize, sorghum, millets and other cereals under these agroforests dramatically increases their drought resilience also in dry years because of positive soil moisture regimes and a better microclimate. And during the dry season, when they are in full leaf, they provide a rich source of livestock fodder through their leaves and pods, greater than the best of what we see in many other systems. Finally, imagine that these systems increase carbon sequestration above and below ground by an order of magnitude greater than what you find in conventional conservation agriculture. Ladies and gentlemen, this isn't a dream, and it isn't imaginary. It's actually a system of agriculture that is already practiced today by millions of farmers in Africa. The tree is the African acacia, an indigenous species, botanically called phyherbia. It's cultivated by farmers across the African continent throughout the Sahel to East Africa and to Southern Africa as a fertilizer and fodder tree. For example, I met these hardworking ladies last year out harvesting their maize in Central Malawi where they and a half million of their neighbors have these acacia trees in their maize fields. They told me how they were making barely ten bags of maize per acre before they began cultivating the trees, that's about a ton per hectare. But after they began culturing these trees as an intercrop with their maize plants, their soils improved to such an extent that they've been regularly harvesting triple the yields year after year in a sustainable production system. Now, trial data from dozens of scientific studies in countries all over Africa bear out what these ladies were telling us. These are the latest results from scores of trials in Zambia alone during the past three years where a massive scaling up program for cultivating phyherbia in maize production is currently underway. And what you see is a doubling to tripling of yields typically over large numbers of trials. Now growing cereal crops in association with these amazing African acacias does typically double or triple crop yields and this is across a whole series of crops such as millet, sorghum, and others without the application of inorganic fertilizer. And let us recall that currently less than 20% of African farmers actually use inorganic fertilizer for one reason or another. But these practices dramatically build soil organic matter and soil fertility and soil biology over the long run to sustain these high yields, making mineral fertilizer application all of the more attractive and efficient to farmers who practice these intercrops. So it's not an either or situation. It's a complementary and supplementary approach. Now imagine that the positive biodiversity effects that would be achieved if the agricultural landscape were covered by the kinds of trees that farmers find compatible with their food crops such as phyherbia. You can actually see that vision on over 5 million hectares of millet and sorghum farms in Niger, one of the poorest countries in the world actually where there has been an explosion of tree culture such as you see here in the past 15 years. Now the dark green spots in this photo are the millet fields. The white globs are the canopies of the phyherbia trees bear and dormant in the wet season with tree populations anywhere between 30 and 300 trees per hectare. Here is another view in Niger of how small holder agricultural lands now have dense tree biodiversity over vast landscapes. Yesterday Howard Buffett fundamentally challenged us in his brilliant presentation. He said and I quote, I've concluded that we really need to approach agricultural development differently. We've got to approach it in ways that are affordable to small holders. And Dr. Swaminathan, you have been calling for an evergreen revolution for over 30 years now, an agriculture that produces much more while building on the best ecological principles. The systems we see portrayed here embody those principles. Farmers have identified and deployed these unique biological tools. The tools are already proven and they are amenable to much larger deployment on a wide range of farming systems. We can now build on the tree genetic diversity that farmers have identified and nurtured combined with the best of modern agricultural science and practice. They are not incompatible. They are fully synergistic. Well fortunately more than a dozen countries in Africa are now working on evergreen agriculture scaling up programs including the ones that I've mentioned Malawi, Zambia, Niger, Burkina Faso and a number of others in East, Southern and West Africa. And many development partners such as NAPAD, ABRA, EFAD and others are taking an active interest in supporting this vision. It has been a great pleasure working with you Dr. Swaminathan stimulating also evergreen agriculture visions for India as well. Our opportunity is that together with the farmers we are now creating the vibrant partnerships to realize an evergreen agriculture in Africa and elsewhere in the tropics. Thank you very much. Mr. Dennis, I think he has given a very important message about incidentally the normal model of start of this career as a forest staff. I would have been very happy to hear. He always used to tell me don't neglect forestry in the Himalayas. Agriculture is important but forestry is more important. So I'm glad that Dennis has brought this enthusiasm. This one hundred three, five half year Alpida, the whole concept of fertilizer locking up carbon banks in the soil as a mitigation measure. And also in evergreen agriculture which is the only one which will keep permanently for more sappy. And so thank you for this wonderful now.