 First of all, let me just thank the many people that are in this room who contributed to this task force effort. I see many of you there. Tony has spoken. Alan Jury has spoken. Each of them contributed. Charlotte Halbervans here, Julie Howard, many of the people from the congressional offices as well, Connie Vallette, Peter Frosh, who was here earlier. Pardon me. And Amy and Murphy. We are very grateful and we're very reliant upon our friends, those that we are able to convene from many different diverse parts to contribute to efforts of this kind. And that's our standard way of doing business. And it's what we draw really, the vitality and the integrity of the work that we do. We are also very reliant upon the friends, the experts, the special experts, like we'll be hearing momentarily from Phil Pardee, and also from folks in the administration. And we have the benefit of acting Deputy Assistant Secretary Bill Kraft here today. This is an effort typically that is engineered with a core group of members of the task force who are operating outside of government, but also a broader pool of people who are in government or in international organizations who have this kind of special expertise that we need to tap as we look forward. The food security issue, we've all seen a remarkable rise of this issue to the four in the 0708 crisis in the way that Congress has played on this issue and continues to play President Obama's decision to make this one of the signature pieces of foreign aid in this first administration's tenure. And to bring that forward at the G8, which we will see more of over the course of the summer, we're heading as we move towards September to the UN General Assembly summit on the Millennium Development Goals, in which extreme poverty and hunger will figure, obviously, as a central feature. We're also in the midst of major debate internally within the administration and here on the Hill and among interest groups around the future, the broad macro future of foreign aid reform. And this particular set of issues remain very vital in trying to figure out what kind of manner of moving forward makes sense. And a lot of one of the very appealing aspects of the work that's been undertaken by Johanna and many of you in the room is the continuation of a continuing insistence on tying what happens on food security to the foreign aid reform to water and sanitation to the Global Health Initiative. We're going to be hearing today about the overall character of the report and its genesis and its major findings and conclusions. Johanna Nesseth, the Vice President for Strategic Planning and Development at CSIS. She's been in that role now for nine years. She has spearheaded this effort. She's a great colleague and has really been indefatigable in moving this forward and extremely consultative, I think, really in trying to listen carefully to the opinions of a diverse group of experts in trying to assemble this report. And congratulations to you, Johanna, for this and we're very much in your debt for the way in which you've gone ahead and pulled this together. She will present the overall report. She will be followed by Bill Kraft, who is the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Trade Issues in the Bureau of Economic and Business Affairs at the Department of State. Bill has a lead responsibility on matters pertaining to Doha and to WTO. And we're very glad and grateful, Bill, that you've chosen to come and be with us today. Dr. Phil Pardee from the University of Minnesota and also prior to that at IFPRI and remains very integral to IFPRI will be speaking to the issues of research and development. He is a renowned expert in that area, has published widely and extensively on that, both with respect to our own domestic research and development agenda on agriculture and globally in that way. There are a few themes that you'll see coming forward here that we need to measure better, that we need to preserve the central feature of bipartisanship in moving forward, that we need to act both bilaterally or bilaterally and multilaterally. We had this very promising new initiative at the World Bank recently last week on the creation of the Large Ag Fund, in which the US played a prominent role in making a forward commitment of $490 million. And obviously, this is a feature of foreign aid reform. It is de facto a form of that. And we hope that the way in which we move forward, both in Congress and the executive branch and in groups like this, will help us move that along. So with that, I would like to invite Johanna to open up and then we'll move to Bill and to Phil, and then we'll come back to you, the audience, and ask for your comments and questions. So Johanna, thank you. Thank you, Steve. Steve, you've been an invaluable colleague and advisor on this project and appreciate your role throughout the past year. You've all picked up a copy of the report. I'm glad that you could be here today and glad that we have the report in print. It just arrived yesterday. I'll share a little bit with you about the key recommendations, a little bit more about the process we went through to reach these recommendations. After our 2008 report that was co-chaired by Senators Casey and Luger, we felt the need to move beyond some of the short-term issues that we covered in that report and really take a more in-depth look at some of the long-term drivers of agricultural productivity and of poverty in poor countries. Senators Luger and Casey were at that point joined by Congresswoman McCullum as a co-chair. For obvious reasons, I think you've already heard today. And in our efforts, we focused primarily on three areas. We wanted to take a look at methods and approaches to raise productivity among smallholder farmers. We wanted to focus more on an area that we don't focus on much at CSIS. That's more the domestic U.S. ag issues, especially in terms of the U.S. ag research agenda and what that means. And then finally, we wanted to look at the role of trade in food security. In addition, during the course of our efforts, the Food Security Initiative was announced by the administration, so we also looked at some of the organizational issues around that effort. Now a group of about 30 people has met for at least 10 times to talk about these issues. We've heard from many experts. We've gotten help from a lot of people. In government, I see Susan Offit is here, the Chief Economist of the GAO, Joe Glauber, Chief Economist at USDA, two World Food Prize laureates. There's a whole list of people who have spoken with us and given their insights as we consider different recommendations that we might put forward. That list is in the back of the report. You can take a look at it. We have also published two papers. We published one on productivity approaches by Melinda Smale and Tim Mahoney. And the second was by Phil Partey on the ag research agenda. And those are both available at our website. We have two forthcoming. In May, we will publish a report on trade by Charlotte Heberbrand and Kristen Wedding at CSIS. And we will have one out looking at African attitudes on biotechnology. And that'll come out within the next month. That's by Jen Cook at CSIS. I want to just recognize a few people. The full list of task force members are in the back of the report. And I am not able to highlight each person but want to thank each person who was involved. This is generally a consensus document representing people's individual views. They didn't sign on representing their organization or their organization's views, but each person had tremendous expertise and we thank them. Connie Vallette from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Peter Frosh and Betty McCullum's office and Damien Murphy and Senator Casey's office were very important to our efforts. At CSIS, Kristen Wedding and Brett Baptist, Betty McCullum mentioned them and they have really been absolutely essential on our work as Jennifer Cook, Kay Thompson and Karen Meacham. We had important partners. I probably did about 150 different consultative meetings throughout the course of the year and some of our key partners who I talked to over and over and over were the World Food Program with Josette Sheeran and Alan Jury and Jen Parmelay and Chris Moore. Kare Helene Gale who's on our board and David Kauk who is with Kare at the time. Julie Howard, Charlotte Haberbrand and Marshall Bhutan and Lisa Eakman of the Chicago Council were all very important in our efforts and we partnered with them in various ways to highlight key issues that we were covering and then the World Bank, Vera Songway and Will Martin and others. I don't want to leave anyone out. These are some of the people where we actually sat down and had events, had discussions on a repeated basis. We're very grateful to the Hewlett Foundation and the Gates Foundation who underwrote our efforts. And as I mentioned, we had, or as Steve mentioned, we had input from many people within the government including Josette Lewis and Tutweiler, some folks at GAO who have all been mentioned in the report so you'll be able to take a look at those. Now in 2008, as we put forward our recommendations, we looked at some of the structural shifts in supply and demand in the global food supply that were really some of the underlying problems with the food price crisis. And what that crisis highlighted, as most of you here know, was the fact that the US and the developed world had really gotten out of the business of agricultural development. And if we wanted to really take on poverty and hunger in a serious way, the US had to become a leader in this space. But we had to look at how we would rebuild these capacities because they had declined seriously over time. And in areas like ag research, we've had a big ramp up over time since the Green Revolution but we are seeing declining investments in research which Phil will highlight in a few minutes. Now I'll talk you through some of the key recommendations. On the Global Security Initiative, one of the big questions has been about the organization of the initiative. This group felt very strongly that USAID should be the lead implementing agency. They also felt strongly that there should be a coordinator who will coordinate the interagency process who should be backed by the White House and have strong presidential backing. We wanted to focus on monitoring and evaluation, in part to help weather some of the ups and downs so that we don't get into the business for five or six years and then suddenly decide we need to get out because of problems, because of mistakes, because it's just not working. And then also just absolutely crucial is that building support among Congress and the public for sustained efforts and sustained commitments. On the productivity chapter, we looked at productivity among smallholder farmers specifically, we looked at the fact that every country, every region, many local areas are gonna have very, very different needs in their efforts to raise productivity, so very broadly, we wanted to emphasize the importance of country-led plans that are developed in coordination with US efforts, focusing on farmers, in particular women farmers, and developing programs that will meet their particular needs. Couldn't overemphasize the importance of natural resource stewardship and the need to look at that and make that an integral part of any effort. We talked about regulatory capacity for new technologies. We talked about the need for countries who are interested in developing biotechnology, regulatory structures, providing assistance, and then also leveraging the private sector in terms of food processing and methods and markets and all of the different ways that the private sector could be involved. Our second area was ag research and development and Phil will highlight some of the declining investments in ag R&D but the need to reinvest in this area for continued productivity gains and even maintenance and also for fighting off some of the threats that are on the horizon and even at our doorstep, things like wheat rust, things like changing dry climates where better crops are needed to resist droughts and heat. And I have to say that I was reminded in a conversation with a group from Mali last week that Julie Howard brought in about the real uniqueness of the US university system, the practical nature, especially the land grant system. Phil and I are both University of Minnesota graduates and it's easy to take for granted that we have this natural extension program and we have professors who are connected closely to the farmers who are using the products that they're developing, the technology they're developing that doesn't exist in other places, especially in countries whose university systems were modeled more on European models and are much more esoteric and academic and the US university system has tremendous strengths and we wanted to highlight the importance of that legacy of international involvement with the land grant system. We talk about setting priorities and strategies for the food security research agenda, making ag research competitive for any new funds that go into food security research, they should be competitive. Rooting research efforts in strong institutions, the CJAIR system, the land grants, national research centers and focusing on staple crop efforts, focusing really on staple crops for poor countries. And then finally, actively engaging the private sector which has tremendous capacity in research but is gonna need help getting over some of the issues around intellectual property rights, around liability and developing these public-private partnerships that can work through some of these sticking points will be important. Finally, we look at integrating trade and food security and I think at the bottom of all of these efforts in order to really sustain the achievements that can be made over the long run, we have to make trade an integral part of the process. Productivity gains, as Chris Moore from the World Food Program said, we can't grow our way out of this. We've gotta be able to give people access to markets, we've gotta be able to make food flow back and forth. We would start by acknowledging that the US, Europe, Japan and other developed countries have to consider their trade policies and their impact on developments, make efforts to move forward with the Doha round of talks. And more concretely at this moment, I think our starting point really was let's renew the role of trade in US foreign policy. Trade is a primary way that the US interacts with other countries and we need to re-engage substantially. In terms of food security specifically, we talked about the role of trade capacity building. We wanna focus on increasing efforts to build regional integration and focus on the regional communities in especially in capacity building and regulatory assistance. With the World Bank and others, the US, especially the MCC, should be coordinating infrastructure investments. We talked a little bit about the role of China in China's investments in infrastructure and exploring ways that we can better understand what they're doing. And then also reforming US trade preferences programs and maintaining attention to the export bans and alert systems in other ways that can reduce the difficult impact of export bans that were so damaging in 2008. And then also continuing to look at emergency assistance and revitalizing reforming emergency assistance, increasing the level of local and regional purchase of food stocks. So that's just a summary of the report. I hope you'll all have a chance to read it. It is online. Also online are the background papers that I mentioned. You can find all of this on our website. Tony Cordesman's brief is also there. He put out a brief commentary yesterday as well. So I want to warmly thank the group of people who have been very patient and very dedicated in working on this with us over the past year. Thank the co-chairs for their leadership and thank our group today. We appreciate having you here. Thank you, John. Bill Kraft. Well, thank you. I'm very happy to be here today with so many old friends and folks that we've been working with on this very, very important issue for quite a while. Let me start by joining with John and the CSIS folks in thanking and congratulating Senators Luger and Casey and Representative McCallum for their leadership on this critical issue. It really is a pleasure to work on something that is bipartisan and bicameral and really is as important as this is. I'm going to just hit a couple of the highlights of the administration's Feed the Future initiative and I would commend to everyone who wants to see as many of the gory details as are out in public yet to pull up Deputy Secretary Lou's testimony from April 22nd in this room, actually. That is the definitive piece at the moment. It continues to evolve over time. And so if in my very brief summary of what the program is, I forget your favorite pet rock. I'm sure it's in Deputy Secretary Lou's statement and that's the definitive piece. This is just the quick and dirty executive summary. But as has been noted, President Obama and Secretary Clinton are deeply committed to both meeting the Millennium Development Goals, particularly as they relate to hunger and to increasing the development component of American national security and American national foreign policy to put development on a par with diplomacy and defense. They really see these three things as being critically interrelated. And as Senator Luger noted, they really do see food security as being not just about food, but about all security, national security, economic security, environmental security, and human security. I think I can skip all the part about the need. We all agree and I think the report does a tremendous job of laying out what the trend lines are and how with given population growth and the fact that we'll be facing less water as climate change dries up some irritable land, that we really do have a massive challenge in front of us. And President Obama and Secretary Clinton and the whole cabinet are committed to doing everything we can to fight that. And we really thank CSIS both for their past work, the 2008 report I thought was excellent. This report I haven't completely processed yet, but it appears to be excellent and I agree with almost all of it. Even the parts where I have little tweaks, I mean, it's a really, really valuable study and will really be a major contributor to helping people think about how we wanna go forward in this area. Secretary Clinton has laid out a six-part vision that reflects where she wants to see us take the Feed the Future Initiative. And let me just hit the highlights of that for you if I can. First, she wants us to focus on areas where we have a comparative advantage. She feels that in the past USAID programs have tended to sprinkle a little fairy dust across a great many projects in a great many countries without really reaching our critical mass and really focusing in the things that we do well. And one of the things we're trying to do with Feed the Future is focus on a few countries and a few sectors on things that the US government working together with the private sector and NGOs and other donor governments can do well. And that's one of the things we're trying to target. We're also trying to raise the level of resources that are being devoted to this. We talked about earlier some of the trend lines that have showed how the amount of money being spent in this area has gone up recently in the President's FY11 request. He's asking for even more continuing to build on the rate of growth. And we're hoping we've requested $1.6 billion for Feed the Future and another $200 million to fund nutrition through the Global Health Initiative that we are coordinating and making an integral part of Feed the Future. The second factor in the Secretary's program is she wants us to align our diplomatic and development efforts. And she wants our diplomats to reinforce our development experts and vice versa. And that has caused a bit of a paradigm shift on how state and aid relate to each other and talk back and forth. And it really is a growth experience at one we're working through. Third, we're absolutely committed to a whole of government approach. I will confess that the intellectual leadership for this initiative has come fundamentally out of state and AID. We have reached out to draw upon the expertise of the Treasury Department as we work through the multilateral institutions. We've, USTR has been deeply involved working at the trade parts of it. USDA, obviously, has taken the lead on a number of areas, including on research and development, which is a key component of the initiative. And we've been spending a lot of time reaching out to the Millennium Challenge Corporation and to PEPFAR, both to see how they have done somewhat similar projects in the past. And in particular, we're trying to draw from them their work on accounting and accountability and measurement and how do you set metrics so you can see if your project is working or not. And if not, how do you change it to make it work? And if it can't be changed to make it work, how do you move on to the next country? Fourth, we are committed to partnership. And that partnership is not just among the agencies in the US government, but it's also with the host governments, one of the lessons we've learned in the past from AID projects is that unless you have the active buy-in by the host governments that you're not gonna make any long-term progress. And we're also committed to partnership with NGO groups, with other international organizations like the World Food Program that are operating on the ground. And frankly, we're also committed to coordinating with other governments that are donors in various countries. There was a big conference in Rwanda that the Rwandan government called together to coordinate the efforts by all of the donors operating on the ground in Rwanda, both government and private sector. There's gonna be a similar sort of activity in Bangladesh in the coming days. And this is the model that we wanna see going forward. It's not just about the US government working with host governments, but it needs to be a big tent approach. Folks talked earlier about some of the multiplier effects here. We think they've been very positive and effective to this point. Many of you, of course, are familiar that at Aquila last year, the president promised $3.5 billion over three years. And we're able to multiply that into commitments of over $18 billion by other countries. That's an area that we're focusing on very, very hard as we get ready for the next G8 summit at the end of June in Canada. We are pushing very hard to make sure that everybody that pledged money at Aquila is on track to get their ball rolling and to have a significant portion of their money obligated and committed and out there. We're also very pleased that using money from FY10, we were able to work with a number of other countries, including Spain, Korea, Canada, and others to launch the World Bank Trust Fund that was discussed earlier. We put up $67 billion and hope to be able to come up with another 400-something million, I'm sorry, we put up $67 million. And we hope to come up with another 400-something million as part of FY11. But just with that $67 million, we got pledges of over $400 million from others to get the World Bank Trust Fund launched last week. And one of the interesting things about that is that one of the big donors to that contribution was the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. And we think this is an important example of the way that the U.S. can use seed money both to get increased contribution to other governments but to reach out and work with the private sector and NGO groups and foundations as a whole of planet approach to moving forward. The fifth element of the program is to focus on this country ownership. So we are working with countries that have plans that are measurable and deliverable and which meet very, very strict criteria. One of the criteria that we've stressed upon countries that if they want to get a substantial dollar investment from the United States in their plan is they must make sure that they reach out and give access to women to their plans as they go forward. Women are the majority of farmers, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa, but in most developing countries. And it is just simply not possible to go forward with a food security initiative that does not guarantee the rights of women to get access to financing and modern technology and seeds and education and other elements necessary to be able to increase production. And that is something that we have been pushing very, very hard. Finally, we're focusing on sustainability and accountability and we are doing things in a measurable way and we are committed to reporting to the public and to the Congress what is working and what's not working and to change what isn't working. With Alan here, I can't skip over the paragraph about Feed the Future is not intended to replace emergency food aid as we saw in Haiti Emergency Food Assistance is a vital tool for saving lives and will continue to be so. It's part of our mantra we say it every time. Joanna asked me just to touch briefly on a couple of trade issues. I am working as many in the US government are on the Doha development agenda. We have not given up on that. That continues to be one of our primary targets. It is very hard. It's not something that the United States can do alone. We need the cooperation and frankly, we need countries like India, Brazil, China, South Africa, the big emerging middle income countries to step up and do more than they've been willing to do so far. You haven't heard a lot about it in the press recently but efforts continue in that regard. Last week there was a big meeting in Punta da Lista Uruguay of the Karens Group countries of agricultural exporters talking about ways that we can work together to try to continue to push Doha forward. There's a meeting this week in Paris of some of the big players in the Doha round to see if there's any basis for moving forward. I'm going to a meeting at the OECD in Paris in two weeks that will focus on ways that we can try to push the Doha round forward. So even though we're not making great progress and you haven't heard much about it in the press, it is still absolutely a critical element of the administration's trade agenda. The report also talks on preference programs a little bit and we are working with the Congress on preference reform. We did succeed last year in getting a number of agricultural products added to the eligibility list for programs like Ogoa and GSP, things like frozen potatoes. We think there's a lot more that can be done as Congress looks at revising and extending preference programs. I might flag that one of the very few areas where we have a little quibble with the report is it talks about sort of a simplified, unified preference program, but as Tony was saying earlier, the situation on the ground, for example, in Afghanistan is different and special and might require particularly focused programs and as the State Department, we are very keenly aware of the need to have the ability to have focused sort of special programs or special cases of which Afghanistan might be a good example. So that might be one place where we have a slight hint of daylight between us, but I don't think it's a life and death thing. And then let me just sum up very quickly. As we envision Feed the Future, we are working very hard with our focused countries, getting them to hopefully reduce tariffs on agricultural products. We are increasing capacity building with their custom services to try to reduce the cost and time of moving products between countries in particularly Sub-Saharan Africa. We're working with MCC to make sure that they are focusing some of their deep investments on transportation corridors to make it possible to move agricultural products from areas of relative surplus to areas of relative shortage if there is another food spike such as we had two years ago. And we're working very hard with all of our focused countries to create an environment to encourage agribusiness growth. And that includes fighting government policies that discourage food production and we would put food bans in that category and that continues to be one of part of our mantra that we strongly oppose any government's attempt to limit food exports, to help ensure their own national food security, which we believe has a bigger than ever impact that makes food less secure for everybody and raises prices for everybody and doesn't get anybody where they wanna go. And why don't I stop there and turn it over to Phil. Thank you, Bill. Phil, floor is yours. Thanks, Dave, and thanks to Joanna for inviting me to be part of this project. What I'm gonna spend a few minutes on is just providing some perspectives on why agricultural research and agricultural productivity is seen as a very key and central element to a long-term food security strategy. And quite a few folks have mentioned the price spikes in 2008 where we saw commodity prices for staple food and feed crops more than double. And it turns out we had price spikes prior to 2008, we had price spikes back in the 1970s and we had price spikes back in the 1940s and price spikes back in the 1920s. But the history of the 20th century is not those spikes, it's actually a secular decline in the real price of staple food commodities. And the big question on the table is, as we come on the backside of the last commodity price spike where prices haven't fallen to the levels that they were prior to the price spike, has the price spike gotten away of a potential structural shift in those long run trends in agricultural commodity prices such that we are not going to see a return to a continuation of decline in those prices or perhaps even a shift in the structure to an increase in prices going forward. And as an economist, it comes down to a simple question, simple in telling but complex in assessing between the relative rates of growth of supply and demand. And so what we've witnessed putting aside the price spikes is an overall pattern of supply growing faster than demand over the 20th century. And we know with a reasonable degree of precision that the drivers on the demand side that we've got per capita incomes have grown substantially and are likely to continue to grow substantially looking forward. And we've had very substantial increases in population and as we look forward, we're looking at another three million odd mouths to feed by 2050. And so the demand pattern is pretty well set there and the big question on the table is what's going to happen going forward with respect to the supply side of the equation. And there's mountains of evidence, some of which I and colleagues have generated but lots of folks beyond that are looking at the drivers of supply. And the big driver elephant in the room is productivity growth and the big source of productivity growth. There are various sources of productivity growth but a big source of productivity growth is long-term investments in R&D. So what do we know about what's been going on in terms of productivity in ag R&D? And as with the report we did for CSIS but some other reports we've just finished up and one that will actually be coming out through Iowa State University looking at global trends and agricultural productivity raises all sorts of warning bells for me as someone has been looking at this for a quarter of a century. And what we see particularly here in the US is a slowing down in the rates of growth of crop yields in the post-90 period relative to the decades earlier than that and a slowing down in the rate of growth of much more complex multi-factor productivity measures that if those slowdowns persist going forward they're going to raise really big concerns with respect to global food security issues not least the US alone is a major dominant player in global agricultural markets. 20% of the world's entire cereal production takes place in this country and more than 40% of the entire world's corn production takes place in this country. So if the US stalls or falters in terms of productivity growth going forward that's going to have a very direct consequence in terms of the global supply of these staple food and feed commodities. The other dimension to this story is the role of R&D in driving past productivity growth in the US has been dominant. I mean all the econometric and statistical literature shows very strong relationships between rates of growth in R&D spending and the rates of growth of productivity spending but the big caveat is that there's very substantial lags between when you invest in R&D and you realise these productivity consequences. We're talking decadent lags not a year or two so political cycles which are very used to cranking up investments for a year or two and looking for a response. That's not how R&D affects its impact on global food supply. It just still takes seven to 10 years to crank out a new crop variety and it still takes decades for those crop varieties to be taken up by farmers even the modern biotechnologies that are now out there BT corn and those sorts of technologies. It still took 13 or 15 years from the date that they were developed to reach 80% market penetration even in the US where everything works. So if we're looking in the rest of the world where I spent a lot of my time the institutions as people have mentioned in terms of not only getting food aid out but affecting fundamental structural growth and productivity growth in agriculture are wanting and in fact are much more compromised in many parts of the world that I work in now than they were even 20 years ago. So R&D is clearly a big driver in terms of US agricultural output but even US R&D has been a big driver in global productivity growth. So looking back the four guys that were the pivotal scientists that drove the Green Revolution in rice and wheat all came from or were trained in the US. And the US has sustained a very fundamental role within the CGIR, the International Agricultural Research System but also through bilateral arrangements in terms of being a driver of growth through the spillover of ideas and technologies and know-how and so forth into the developing world. And so the story of R&D spending in the US has very fundamental consequences for looking at this global productivity picture and unfortunately the story in agricultural R&D spending in the US is a sorry story. We've had this very rapid growth in R&D spending in the post-Second World War period where in real terms ag R&D spending including public and private spending grew by over 4% a year. But after the 1970s we've had this ratcheting down this slowing in the rate of growth of R&D spending so now being post-1990 real R&D spending public and private in the US for food and agriculture has been growing at less than 1% a year. So if you project that forward and notwithstanding the sort of current pressure to reinvest in agricultural research which I applaud as an economist and worried about global food supply the big question is how to sustain a ratcheting up in those investments because these investments have to be stained for decades not a year or two. There's also a question in terms of what do we spend that money on and as we interrogate the data for the US we've seen very fundamental shifts in both where the funding for research going into the land-grant universities and so forth where I work for come from. So now barely half of the funding going into the land-grant universities comes through the USDA comes through lots of other agencies EPA, Department of Defense and a whole raft of agencies each with its sort of institutional strings attached such that what we now call food and agriculture research in the US bears very little relationship to what constituted food and ag research 30 or 40 years ago. In the early 1970s probably two thirds of all of the research done in the US and the land-grant universities and so forth was directed towards enhancing farm productivity. Now barely 57% of that research has got anything to do with farm productivity. Issues like nutrition and obesity, food security, the environmental footprint of agriculture all of those have been nibbly into that research agenda and whilst there's clear social value and concerns and real work to be done in those areas the reality is that that research has come at the expense of not in addition to maintaining or enhancing farm productivity. So if we look forward in the future and if there's new funding that's being directed into the agricultural sector generally or ag R&D per se if that's following the path that's been set over the last decade or a decade and a half my concern is that it's actually not going to have the food security implications and consequences that we'd all like to see going forward. So I think the message I'd like to leave is that we really need to think about revitalizing these investments in agricultural R&D. Certainly the private sector can play a role in that but it's a fairly muted role in the areas where there's the greatest need for productivity growth. So I spent a lot of time now working for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in Sub-Saharan Africa and many of those systems are highly compromised in terms of their ability to develop and deliver new technologies. The sorry facts are that probably for half the national research systems in the region the resources in real terms per scientist are half what they were 20 years ago. So my colleagues are complaining about tight budgets in the US universities now but think about a halving of your budget and what you can do in terms of real substantive R&D with those sort of budget strictures. It's a very sorry story. So I'm very heartened that there's a new emphasis and a certainly new role played by the Gates Foundation and others to sort of re-engaging in some of these fundamentals. And I think the big trick going forward is to try and sustain that effort. I mean, if you look at the facts, this sort of movement away from enhancing productivity into these other areas in research actually took a U-turn after the last price spike in the 1970s. There was a re-engagement and a redirection of research in the US to enhancing farm productivity but unfortunately it lasted three years. And then the fundamental forces driving the direction of research took over and you've got this continuing slide in farm productivity on an R&D. So I'm hoping we can learn the lessons at the policy level from the past and think about how to redirect and keep a sustained effort going forward for the decades that are gonna be required to make a difference. Thank you very much. I'd like to put two questions forward and then open the floor. One for Phil, if you could talk a bit about the, what is happening among the major BRICS or G20 leadership countries. I mean we know that the dollars coming forward on R&D in Korea and China and India are rather prodigious and what does that impact likely to look like in terms of the productivity gains and the center of authority and power in this particular range? And of course there's the question of what happens in those countries will it have spillover impacts in developing country's settings to some degree or not. And then for Bill Kraft, could you give us a little bit more of a sense of as this food for the future is rolling forward as you're picking spots, as you're designating focal countries, as you're beginning to move forward in implementation of this major initiative, where are we going to be in another year's time? Would you project, what is this going to look like? We have the Global Health Initiative unfolding as well. This week the 10 focal countries will be designated on that. There's a lot of energy in organizing our embassies in those countries and like and staffing them adequately if you could say a bit more about that. But Phil, could you first comment on the question around the Korea, China, India? Sure, one of the key aspects of R&D is that where it's done is not necessarily where it has its impact, fortunately. And so the history of agricultural research is that a lot of the impacts spill over from the location in which the research is done. In fact, the objective evidence as best we can distill it out from the professional literature is that upwards of a third to a half of all of the local productivity gains, whether you're looking at a state in the US or the US or various countries, comes from someone else's R&D. So thinking about these spillover potentials is a really key element, it seems to me going forward, of trying to accelerate development in sub-Saharan Africa and other parts of the world, whereas I say there's a lot of rebuilding of the basic domestic infrastructure for innovation that's required. And so you look to the new parts of the world and I see in the data what is sort of the general folklore that there's evidence of very seismic structural shifts in the sources of innovation in the world. As I mentioned, these slowdowns and productivity growth in the US as we look around the world, that slowdown is fairly pervasive amongst the high-income countries and for a fair number of the developing countries, but not for all of them. And one of the key outliers is China. And in fact, if you put China in and take China out of the productivity story, you change the story. With China in, because they're so large, they're a dominant supplier like the US and many major agricultural commodities in terms of their total share of world production, that they've had very substantial rampings up in productivity growth over the last several decades. You look at the R&D side of the story and they've had commensurate massive ramping ups and investments in infrastructure and institutions and scientists related to productivity growth. So I've done a bunch of work in China and was out there decades ago. And the late 70s, early 80s, they took very strategic decisions to invest in and build scientific and innovative infrastructure around agriculture and have sustained that for two and a half decades or more. And it shows up in their productivity responses. So there is clear evidence that it's a policy choice. This future is just a policy choice. It's not set in stone. And there is a capability, I think, to engage those, India is another, Brazil another, to engage those countries and they themselves are engaging in very interesting and innovative institutional ways, I think, in trying to spurs spillovers. And I think the US and other rich countries, I think, have really a unique opportunity and I agree with Raj Shah. I think notwithstanding the sort of dismal business as usual future, the point is it doesn't need to be a business as usual future. And I think we can really, there's lots of opportunities for creatively building new infrastructure and institutions between the rich countries and these rapidly emerging developing countries and between public and private sector. Thank you, Bill. Well, it's always a little daunting to talk about spending money that you haven't gotten from the Congress yet. But if we, just as economists, we can do this. We can just, assuming that we get all or most of the money we requested in FY 11, the plan goes something like a year from now, we will have announced and been working with our 20 focused countries, which will be scattered through Sub-Saharan Africa and other parts of the world, Latin America and Southeast Asia. And most of those countries, something like 13 to 15 of them will be in what we call phase one status, which is a developmental status. We'll be working with them on trade capacity building and essentially pulling their plans together and working with them to figure out what it is they want to do and how they want to do it in a sustainable way that meets some of our criteria and that hopefully five to seven of those countries will have moved on to what we call phase two status, which would be the very intense, more MCC-like program where we put relatively big bucks into them to help them carry out the plans that we've worked out together and that we're beginning to make real progress. Similarly, on the World Bank Trust Fund side, it's up and running now with the $67 million of seed money that we put in matched by the $400 million that came from the Gates Foundation in Spain and Canada and some of the other countries. If we get something like our $400 million request in the FYI-11 budget, that will be added to the World Bank Trust Fund and one would imagine that a year from now that will be an up and running operational funding programs sort of activity as opposed to the, just announced bright and shiny, but frankly, hasn't done anything yet, status which is where we are at the moment. Thank you. Why don't we open up and take the next 10 minutes or so? Please, there's a microphone right here and there's one right behind you there. If you care to just select one, please just identify yourself and pose your comment and question. Maybe if we've got several people, we'll bundle those together and come back to our speakers. So, sir? Clay Ogg with EPA's Policy Office. A couple of years ago, the leaders of organizations that project food, leaders of organizations that protected food prices said that the price of food is now determined by the price of fuel and some of them have gone on to indicate that productivity gains could spur further, through the economic forces, could spur further expansion of biofuels so to some extent they can be offset and that generally the big picture is that fuel prices determine food prices and some of these folks also went on to describe how you can sever this linkage without affecting the climate policies that biofuels were designed to address. But I'm wondering, I noticed that the report and Representative McCollum did mention that dealing with biofuels was part of what needs to be done, but are you talking about severing this link or what needs to be done about biofuels? Yeah, Charlotte Hebedbrand from IPC. First of all, congratulations to Johanna and the whole CSIS team for this great report. I actually have a couple of questions for Dr. Party. You talked about the overall decline, both in public and private sector investment. I wonder if you could differentiate a little bit more about the trends of public versus private money going into R&D and what some of the ramifications of those shifts are for the agenda going forward. And then I thought it was interesting when you talked about the different priorities being placed on ag research and that some of those have actually taken the focus off of ag productivity. I wonder whether the climate change research agenda actually offers the possibility to sort of bring a couple of those things back together because it seems to me that increased productivity is sort of a win-win both in terms of food security and also in terms of climate change. If you think of things like land use change and carbon and soils, thank you. Thank you very much. Is there a third? Yes. Yes, please. Thank you. I'm Jennifer Rigg with Save the Children. Thank you all so much for your work on this. I have two quick questions. First on R&D, how do you propose making sure that these increased investments and changes in the R&D focus really get to small scale farmers and their families? Just having the chance to recently visit some of the farmers working with our projects at Would Save the Children in Guatemala. I was struck by how hard it really is to make sure through radio, through whatever resources might be available, the benefits of the low tech research that we already have even make it to the field. We've talked a little bit about extension, but if you could share a little bit more about your thinking on this front, that would be helpful. And then secondly, I really appreciate the candor, the everything that everybody's doing with the Feed the Future initiative to let us know how we can help in moving to this vision of one year plus. What link would you make between the Global Food Security Act and the work moving forward? How can we make sure that the amended Global Food Security Act that we heard about from policymakers earlier today can indeed move forward in conjunction with the initiative of the Global Hunger and Food Security work being done by the administration so that it can authorize this work to continue long beyond the current administration. Thank you. Thank you. In various ways, those questions touch all of our speakers. And why don't we just start Johanna? Why don't you pick off those pieces that you see as well, and then we'll move to Bill and Phil. Thank you. To the first question about the biofuel link, we hit this more in our 2008 report and put forward some recommendations about revising US biofuels policies. You can take a look at those because we felt that those still stand and should be addressed. And I think our co-chairs have been fairly strong in saying they think that biofuels are relevant and are an important springboard to next generation of biofuels, cellulosic and so on. And Phil has done more work on this, so I'll let him comment on the viability of it. I wanna just say one thing about the productivity research, the low-tech research to reach smallholder farmers. We actually hit on that more in the productivity side. I think as we talked about this issue, the question is really how do you get some of those new technologies, or even very old hybrid seeds and other technologies to farmers. And it's really an approach that looks at farmer education, at outreach, at working with women farmers in helping them to understand what the technologies are. How do you use it? How do you use fertilizer so you don't over-fertilize use too much, but also providing financing so that people have credit or access to by-seeds and fertilizers and other sort of low-tech types of productivity enhancers. Yeah, on the biofuel side, let me just note that the administration is committed to continued research and the implementation and development and commercialization of biofuels, but that they are committed to doing it in a way that does not impact the food supply. We're trying to move as rapidly as possible to sort of second-generation programs that use waste products and saw grasses and things like that, so that there won't be any impact on the food supply by increasing the amount of biofuels. Getting back to the question on how to reach out to small-scale farmers, we're doing that through a couple of different channels. That is one of the criteria that we use as we were talking to governments about whether they are going to get significant investments from us as part of this. We think we have to start with the small-scale farmers and then work up as opposed to starting in the capitals and then counting on a trickle down. And we're looking at doing that through a couple of different ways, one of which is technology and part of this is we're bringing some of our expertise in areas like cell phones and solar chargers for cell phones and applications for cell phones that can help with microfinance and market information is being built into this and part of the program will be us trying to get cell phones and cell phone chargers out to subsistence farmers in various areas to help them know where the markets are best for their products, if there are warnings about floods or information available on how to deal with various pests, we're trying to get the information out that way. And there is an important sort of land grant college to local university component to it and the agricultural outreach through the local governments is very important. And one of the things that we're doing there is appreciating that many of the farmers are in fact women. We're urging the governments that we're working with to hire as many women as technical advisors to go out and talk to farmers as possible on the assumption that a woman farmer is more likely to talk to and take advice from a woman expert from the government than she would from a man that might cause sort of level of threat or insecurity that wouldn't be in a woman to woman sort of conversation. So we're trying to work that problem from several different aspects, but I agree with you that fundamentally that has to be at a core of what we're trying to do here. Phil. With respect to the question on sort of public, private R&D trends, to be very clear that the overall trend in the US is not one of a decline in spending. It's a decline in the rate of growth of spending. And that's true in most of the OECD countries for which we've got reliable data. And in fact, the evidence is since 1990, the rich countries, the OECD countries collectively have stalled, actually the subset, the European and the Australian and North American component of the OECD have basically stalled and have had no growth in public agricultural R&D spending in real terms. As I said, in other parts of the world and sub-Saharan Africa, there's been, dismally too many countries with actually a reduction in real spending, but not all, but in parts of Asia and particularly in China and also selected parts of Latin America, there's been sort of mixed growth and non-growth. The public-private share, there's a sort of popular perception that the private sector, even in the US, has stepped into the breach or the vacuum, opened up by a lack of investment in public research. And in the new work we've done, we show no evidence of that. There is a slightly more rapid rate of growth in overall food and agricultural research by the private sector in the US, but not a rapid growth and it's not a wholesale substitution of private for public research that's taken place. And part of that is, I think we perceive, obviously the big growth, perhaps in the biological sciences, researched by Monsanto and St. Genner and Pioneer DuPont and others and mistake that as an indication of what's going on for private ag R&D research in total. But it turns out there's lots of other aspects of food and agricultural research besides that that you have to think about, particularly machinery, chemicals and particularly food processing. It turns out that 60% of all of the private food and ag research in the US is related to processing food. It's got nothing to do with farm productivity per se. So when you look at that overall story, there's a big shift in the composition of that private research portfolio, a much bigger shift in the composition than you see in terms of the relative totals of public versus private growth. The footnote is too that as best we can estimate, 90% of all of that private food and ag research occurs in the OECD countries. Collectively, the poor countries in total constitute around 10% of the entire private food and ag research as seen globally. So there's a big bifurcation in terms of public, private roles in rich and poor countries. Agreed, the climate change agenda may well cause a rethink about the balance in terms of the orientation of the innovation perspectives for ag research in countries like the US and elsewhere. And it points to the fact that we, the levels of productivity that we now experience in countries like the US is ahistorical in the history of 10,000 year history of agriculture. We have crop yields that are three, four times higher than they were barely 100 years ago. And you have to run really hard to stand still. The estimates are that somewhere between 30 and 70% of all of the research that's invested in places like the US is just to maintain that existing yield levels, not to increase them. And that the more knowledge intensive our agricultural production systems become, the harder we have to run to stand still and the even harder we have to run to grow those yields. And so the change in climate footprint on agriculture is an example of this requirement for maintenance research to make as we shift climate realities in particular localities and given the site specific nature of production agriculture, there's gonna be a lot of retooling and reshaping of crop landscapes and crop production and crop management systems to address that the climate change scenario. And the final question I'll address on the small-scale farmers and farm families targeting it, that is a real issue. And I'm optimistic, certainly the work we're doing with IFBRI, with the Gates Foundation and other folks is that there are lots of new data and new tools. We're harnessing geospatial and analytical techniques to try and better target technologies and choose crops and choose agroecologies and so forth that best address the needs of small-scale producers in sub-Saharan Africa. But the footnote, the economist's footprint is that if we're worried about hunger, hungry people extend well beyond farmers. And so as you get looking forward, increasing urbanization, even in sub-Saharan Africa, you have to be worried about things beyond the farm gate in terms of things Bill mentioned, in terms of the infrastructure and required to trade in food both within countries and between countries is gonna be more important going forward in terms of alleviating hunger in tandem with sort of enhancing farm productivity to target to small-scale producers. Did you have some? We're getting towards the end of our time here. Just one parting observation, it seems to me that across the span of issues around food security and along with global health, climate change, we're in a period where the U.S. leadership role is becoming much more conspicuous. I mean, as we head towards the MDG summit in the fall, September, in which perhaps the president is able to sort of offer a new vision of the U.S. development strategy, which is in the works and hopefully will be resolved with a strong statement. I mean, the accounting that's going on right now as to the commitments made five years back at Glen Eagles shows a pretty significant, I mean, the U.S. has delivered and is continuing to sort of drive forward at higher levels. The U.K. have done okay, but you're not going to see continued significant growth in this next phase. France, Germany, Japan, all pretty stalled out. Italy, pretty delinquent. So you have this unusual situation where across a spectrum of key development issues, U.S. leadership becomes very important and then you have the emergence of the G20 as an ambiguous entity where, as you were saying, Phil, the dollars that the Koreans are putting towards R&D or the Chinese or the Brazilians are pretty dramatic. And yet we haven't really answered for ourselves the question of is the G20 going, how do we engage those countries and are they going to take a formed, organized focus on them through the G20 or through some other form? That's completely up in the air right now. We don't really see that. So we are in this big transition moment, it would seem right now, where some of the energy that we've seen from the G8 over the last decade is really not going likely to be sort of fulfilled other than sort of U.S. leadership in the near term, at least, that the economic downturn is showing some pretty dramatic erosion of growth levels and yet on the G20 piece, on the BRICS countries, very significant push forward. Maybe that's your next agenda for your next task for us. But in any case, please join me in thanking all of our speakers here today.