 The title for this session ends on post-2015, which probably means that we should be talking about the Sustainable Development Goals. So I'm going to say just a few things about the 17 Sustainable Development Goals and 169 targets. We've talked a bit about them already. I'm very concerned that these 169 targets do not have priorities identified. Therefore, it seems to me it's almost everything you could imagine to put into that list, and it does worry me. What my colleagues are telling me not to worry because that means that the priorities can be set at the national level, and that may well be it. So here's 169 items in the shopping list, and you decide which of these you want to buy. I have put out a few of the targets that are particularly relevant for food, agriculture, and nutrition, but there are many more, among the 169, eradicate extreme poverty by 2030. That's one of the targets in hunger and food insecurity by the same year in all forms of malnutrition, all forms of malnutrition. That includes, presumably, the malnutrition that's associated with overweight and obesity and chronic diseases. To double agriculture productivity by 2030, if that target is reached, we're going to have an immense surplus of food, so hopefully we won't achieve that target. Ensure sustainable food production systems by 2030. I'm not going to say very much about management and natural resources or climate change simply because we have a chair who says after 20 minutes something nasty is going to happen to you if you still stand here. And the last one I pulled out was universal access to safe water and sanitation, clearly important for achieving the nutrition goals. What I'd like to do now is just to take a quick look at what has happened during the last 15 to 25 years in the food sector. And then I'll end with a set of recommendations that I think we need to look at if we are to come anywhere close to achieving these goals. And I say at least moving towards achieving those goals, whether we achieve them or not remains to be seen. Let me go back to 2007, 2008 when we were confronted with a food crisis and that was the end of the world as we understood it. From that point on food prices were going to be extremely high, we were going to run out of food at the global level. I picked this up from the internet and the argument was you see it's already happening, presumably that was a supermarket that happened to close down, I don't know where the picture came from. This was a good, that was a good time to write books because books that communicate a negative message sell a lot better than books that are more positive. So the coming famine, the global food crisis. Now fortunately farmers didn't know about this book so they actually produced a lot more than what was demanded. During the period from 2005 to 2015, during that 10-year period, the world farmers increased cereal production by more than 23%. As I said that was more than what was needed. So therefore you saw a dramatic increase in cereal stock, more than 30% increased during that 10-year period. If you look at China, look at the yellow line, it was about 70% increase in the case of India, it was about 82% increase. At one point, a couple of years ago, India had 80 million tons of grain in stock. Now they're down to about 50. And one of the reasons they're down to 50 is a lot of the 80 million tons was lost to rot and drought, not drought rats and so on because only half of it was on the roof. But they also managed to export some of what is still good. So right now the warehouses are full. The Thai warehouses are full of rice. The Zambian warehouses were full of maize up until recently, a lot of that was rotting as well. Few years ago Malawi had large surpluses of maize. We got a lot of food sitting around in the various countries. Because of the, let's call it oversupply, prices have dropped dramatically for cereals close to 40% during the last three years. If you look at the food price index, FAO's food price index has dropped by around 27 or so percent. And those are recent figures. Those are from the most recent numbers from FAO in September this month. Now let's look at some of the individual cereals and what happened to the prices. And as you see the dramatic drop in prices during the last three years, you can see the fluctuations. This of course was 0708 when we had the so-called food crisis and close to the end of the world, immediately dropped down to here and then in around 2010-2012 we had another spike. Now the question is, when are we going to have the next spike? Is this a new trend? No, of course not. We're going to have another spike nobody knows when it will be. Whoever does know could make it really rich. If we look at the long-term trends from Mays, we are actually back on the long-term trend now. If you look at the long-term trend with huge fluctuations in the past, this is from 1908 and it runs up until with some projections from OECD. It runs up until about 2020 or so. So this projection, who knows? But anyway, we are more or less back on the long-term downward sloping trend. That is very different from what we hear from some of the advocacy groups that say that we're going to see rapid increases in food prices in the future. These are the wheat monthly prices and again you see the large decrease during the last three years. The dramatic increase in 07, 08. Rice prices are slightly different developments since 07, 08. We didn't have a spike in 2010, 2012. There is a clear downward trend as well. At this point, there was more rice globally than we ever had before. But it wasn't just a matter of short supply relative to demand. There were a number of other things happening there. Let me just give you one anecdote. Roughly at the time we were here, a large quantity of rice which was stored in Japan, it was imported from the United States and the Japanese government didn't think the consumers wanted it so they put it in a warehouse. They had to import it because of WTO regulations and they just left it in there. There was discussion of why that rice shouldn't be released to the global markets so that these prices could begin to come down. At the end of those discussions, the United States and others agreed that that rice could be released. Ten minutes after that decision was made, the rice prices dropped. The rice was never released. That ought to tell us something about whether this was a supply issue or something else. And I wouldn't say, of course, speculation, that's such a nasty word. So we have all this grain, we have all this cereal, we have dramatic drops in prices and then we have huge losses. About one third of what's being produced is lost. Sorry, that's another loss. So that's how many pounds we lose every year. Now, this is purely theoretical. Could it really feed two or three billion people? Who knows for sure. But it's a lot of food that's being lost. Why? For probably mostly for economic reasons. It's not worth it saving it because food prices are relatively low. But it links up with infrastructure and storage and how we waste food at the retail and consumption level. And again, the nature of the loss depends on whether you're in a low income country and a high income country. The HLP has just produced a report on that, which if you're interested in the detail, you can look at that. I don't have time to go into it here. So I said that's another loss. We have dramatic increases in overweight and obesity. There are now more overweight and obese people than there are undernourished people. The estimates vary from 1.5 billion to 2.1 billion. Nobody knows for sure. But we know that a very rapid increase is taking place in overweight and obesity. I'm just showing a few of the countries, Kuwait, a 43 percent. And that's obesity, not just overweight and obesity. That's obesity. And you can go down the list. The United States is about one-third. In the United States, we have about one-third obese, one-third overweight, but not obese, and one-third that is below the body mass of 25. And when I'm really cute, I say that last third is on its way to become obese. But that, of course, is not true, because in fact, there's a good reason to believe that overweight and obesity is on a downward trend in the United States. It's particularly prevalent among low-income households in the United States. That's also the case in the higher-income developing countries, whereas the low-income developing countries, you find more obesity among the high-income groups. All right, so much for the good news. Well, the bad news in the sense of the food situation is that we will be more people. This shows the annual average population growth rate for three periods of time, the period we are in now, the past period, the period we are in now, and the future period to 2100. You see, by 2100, the estimates show that we would be down to either zero or maybe a negative global growth rate. How many people are we going to be by 2050? Probably 9.3 billion. Right now, we're about 7.5. How many are we going to be by 2100? Probably about 11 billion or so. Can we feed those future generations? In my estimate, yes, absolutely we can. However, look at these numbers for the increase in the middle class in Asia. This shows the billion of middle class Asians and the percent of the global middle class up until 2030. Dramatic increase in the number of people who move from lower to middle income. That is where there still is a fairly high income elasticity for food. So that's where you see the dramatic increase over and beyond what is resulting for population growth. This shows the purchasing power. This is just another way of showing basically the same thing. Look at the dramatic increase in purchasing power among the Asian middle class from 2009 to 2020, and that is even more dramatic as you go up to 2030. Dramatic increase in purchasing power. They want more food, and they want this kind of food. They want food of animal origin. They want oils. They want a more diversified diet. They want less grains. They want less cereals, and they want less root crops. So that's another thing we have to take into account when we talk about whether the world can feed future generations. Now, here's the problem. We have all this food, prices are dropping, warehouses are full, the rats are getting fat. We have a lot of people who don't have access. We don't know how many people are food insecure because we don't have an estimate of that. Because remember, food insecurity means lack of access, and we don't know how many people don't have access to a healthy diet, but we have proxies. By the way, we have a triple burden of malnutrition, lack of dietary energy, lack of micronutrients primarily, and excessive net energy intake that we already talked about. This is a proxy for the calorie intake, or a proxy if you like, for food security. But it's only a proxy because this actually measures what people supposedly are consuming or not consuming. So this is after the decision has been made to use the access to acquire food. So it's not food security, but it's probably the best we have. It comes out of FAO. It shows that this is not the chair doing this to me, I'm actually doing it to myself. It shows a decrease of roughly 200 million people or so from the beginning of the Millennium Development Goal to the end of 2015. In 1996, FAO called a World Food Summit, and the members of FAO, member countries, agreed that by 2015 the number of malnourished people, which is, yeah, malnourished is what they call them, I believe, undernourished what they call them, should be reduced by half. And they should have been down here. So that goal was certainly not reached. Then the Millennium Development Goal was reducing by half the percentage. And that's much easier because populations grow. So you can actually achieve the Millennium Development Goal keeping the number of hungry people constant and having a large population increase. That's what ratios will do to you. So you see, not that very many countries managed to do that, fortunately. But you were very close to achieving the Millennium Development Goal. So 200 or so, 200 million people escaped under nutrition, under nourishment, according to the FAO data, three-fourths of those were in China. So if you take China out of the equation, it doesn't look too good, does it? 48 million people escaped, only 48. So it's wonderful we can hide behind the success in China. Look at Sub-Saharan Africa, there was a rather dramatic increase in the number of hungry people. Now, what are we going to do about this? I'm going to suggest three things, and I don't have time to go through the details because I already got the first sign here. First, we need to help low-income developing countries invest more in infrastructure. Infrastructure is what's holding back millions of smallholder farmers from actually escaping poverty and food insecurity. And I'm making a list of the kind of infrastructure I'm talking about, feeder roads, appropriate institutions, and that's civil society institutions, such as farmer associations, as well as public sector institutions, market information. And you can read the rest of them, rest of the on the list yourself. But unless more investment is made in infrastructure, it's not going to do a lot of good to develop more technology or to tell the farmer to be more efficient because the farmer in many of these situations is in a straight jacket, has to pay five times more for fertilizers than we do in Europe, can't sell the output. The infrastructure isn't there on either side of the farm. Secondly, we need to expand public investment in agriculture, research and technology, particularly to get ready for climate change. Yes, we haven't. I told you the chair was tough. Can you give me one more minute? We are not ready to adapt to climate change. We need much more research focused on salt, tarot and crop varieties, flood tarot and crop varieties, heat tarot and crop varieties, and a number of other things. The fluctuations we're going to see in the future in production and therefore in prices are going to show up. We don't know how quickly the next spike is going to be there, but it's going to show up. We know that. And that's caused to a large extent by climate change. So we need better infrastructure. So we can move food from surplus to deficit areas, but we also need to help farmers get ready for this new production situation that's brought about by climate change. We also need more of the research aimed at yield increases over and beyond what's caused by the climate change. One other thing that I shouldn't forget. We need to produce more nutrients per unit of land, labor and water, more nutrients. Almost all of the world's agricultural research is focused on producing more calories. Are we getting fat? Yes, a lot of people are short on calories and it's important we get more calories at a lower price, but we need more nutrients. Two billion people are short on some micronutrient. Iron deficiency is widespread among women and children in particular. We need much more emphasis on expanding the production of micronutrient per unit of resource. And every time I say that to my friends in ag research they say, we have enough to worry about without you adding something else, thank you very much. Well biofortification unfortunately is one of the ways in which this can be achieved. But in the ultimate we should have a diversified diet and therefore we should have a diversified production portfolio. Industrial fortification again can help particularly in urban areas. My last point Madam Chair and then I've done is that if we are to achieve the sustainable development goals the public sector has to facilitate private sector investments. We have to stop looking at the private sector as the enemy. We have to work together and it probably means in the sequence where the public goods have to be in place before the private sector can make money. And if the private sector can't make money it probably wouldn't make the investments. And I'm making a list of things that need to be done. Let me mention just one thing, small hold of farmers have very little purchasing power to buy fertilizers, improve seeds or whatever else they need. They need access to credit or they need access to savings institutions. They also need risk management tools because we are going to have these fluctuations resulting from climate change as well as government policies and speculation and whatever else comes our way. So they need better risk management tools and they need a number of other things. But my main point on this is that the private and the public sector have to work together not necessarily in a partnership at a particular time but the public sector has to make sure the public goods are there so that the private sector can do its job. And with that I thank you for your patience Madam Chair.