It starts with something on the production side and in particular making farmers more resilient. Recent years have been conflicting influences on farmer resilience and climate change is forcing farmers to adapt to warmer temperatures as well as more frequent extreme events such as typhoons. These trends are making it more difficult for farmers to be resilient. On the other hand, the importance of non-farm income to farm households is growing over time and non-farm income is less affected by climate shocks, giving farmers an option to increase their resilience. My first question is for you President Hungle. As a leader of a major international financial institution that's focused on smallholder farmers, you're a champion of smallholder farmers unlike the other IFIs. What approaches are you using to improve the resilience of your member countries? Is it technologies, policies, institutions, all of that? What are countries asking for and how are you responding? Thank you so much and once again thank you so much for inviting us. To answer your question on the resilience, obviously the real starting point is at the policy level. So what we do, we engage in a lot of policy dialogue with our member states, but that policy dialogue has to be driven firstly by the awareness raising. So more and more what we do before we start our designing of our activity or our project at the community level, you really need to make sure that you have the buy-in and the importance of addressing the resilience up front. In other words, what is really crucial is not like you want to specifically address one or two issues, is to mainstream the resilience in your program or your project. It doesn't matter where you are, obviously if you know that you are more prone to some type of challenges, you have to mainstream that very specifically. But even if you are not aware of any specific risk for your community or your country, it's important that you mainstream the global resilience into the starting point at the community level, then at the policy dialogue level. What we've seen nowadays is increased requests. The demand that as a financing institution focusing on small holders through the government, what we've seen is an increased demand that is related to resilience and adaptation on that. Be it from climate change or simply environmentally related. At the same time, the government want to focus the lending side on pure production while maybe looking for the grant side for the resilience and the adaptation side. So more and more what you do and together also with other partners, the Jeff and the Green Climate Fund and et cetera, you try to peg and on one hand you have the production activity, then you embed the resilience side. You mentioned also the technology dimension, which is critical. And that comes to at a different level. If you look at the production side, first of all, training the small holders because the human capital dimension we can't underestimate. So it's first of all trying to train the small holders to a different farming techniques that are naturally more preparing them for more resilience and per se. It also means that technology, and I will certainly come back on that, making technology available and affordable is not sufficient to be available. It has to also be affordable on that. That will help them be much more resilient and quick reaction to on situational demand. Another important point is the building the institutions. And building the institution, it just cannot be obviously at the national level, but sometimes also at the regional level, namely when and that also the linkage between the public or the national institution on one hand, the academic and the scientific world on the other hand is going to be crucial. The typical classic example is the weather forecasting data. That just by on one hand what we do in some of our projects is to organize, we develop this which we call PARM, which is a platform for risk management. So just organizing the farmer organizations and linking them to the national institution and the academic for them to even the simplify that they can know ahead of time, the weather forecast in the coming weeks already helped a lot in preparing them to face the upcoming event. So the institutional dimension, we can't underestimate that point. So in a nutshell what you're saying is a combination both from the policy side, we start with the community and then at the technology and the institution side. Thank you very much. The question for Honorable Minister Chivanukha, you have been finance minister for Uganda and as finance minister the pressures from all sector ministries are enormous. Now as our African governments spending enough money on agriculture in order to make farmers more resilient. I think President Humber talked about when it comes to governments normally want to get grants when they want to do adaptation otherwise they want to put all the money on the production side.  So what does it in African governments emphasis on resilience, is it putting its own money and are they spending it on the right things? You know governments love to spend money on subsidies but are they putting where the money where it should be and given the limited financing capacity of governments are African governments collaborating with the private sector to make farmers more resilient because that's where the money is coming into your agriculture sector. So I would really appreciate to get your thinking on the larger issue of resilience and our governments putting their money and what is the kind of collaboration with the private sector. Honorable Chivanukha. Is the microphone on? Thank you very much and thank you for inviting me to address the International Rice Congress and within a meeting of such eminent agriculturalists and scientists I feel I have to explain why I think I belong here. First of all I don't like to call, at least for Africa, I don't like to call agriculture agriculture because it's seen as a subsistence occupation. I like to call agriculture agribusiness and as agribusiness that is the main focus of the majority of African countries and their African households. The second point I'd like to make is that through agriculture or agribusiness Uganda where I come from certainly East Africa and I think the rest of Africa this is the only way we can carry out our structural transformation which all countries are talking about, structural transformation which is both sustainable and inclusive as far as the economies are concerned. So those are the two reasons why I feel I belong in a gathering like this about agriculture. Are African governments spending enough money? Yes, they're spending quite a lot of money I must say here I'm not a fan of the manifesto or the pledge mentality. Declaration, I remember there's the famous Maputo Declaration where it said that all African governments pledge to spend 10% of their budget, respective budgets on agriculture. But then you have the Lagos Declaration, you have the Accra Declaration so I made the Maria Declaration whereby you can't say you spend a certain percentage of your budget on agriculture or education or health but how well do you spend what you're spending? Does it have a leverage effect? So I think yes the government is spending money but maybe not in the right direction or the right focus. In my own country and when I was minister the highest we ever spent on budgeted for agriculture was about 7% of the budget, not the 10%, 7%. But that was not my main complaint. My focus was people don't realize how much money is being spent towards agriculture or towards agriculture value chain. If you add in the money spent on irrigation, on rural feeder roads, on marketing corporatives, on subsidies for the health and education of farmers, children, rural people's children, you find I did it once in Uganda and I found we're spending 18% to 20% of the budget towards agribusiness and the inhabitants of agribusiness, the rural inhabitants. So yes we're spending enough money but as Kundi said, are we spending it on the parts that are sustainable? As governments we don't create wealth. We spend the wealth of the taxpayer and the development partners. So it should go where it can self-regenerate. We tend to look at agriculture intervention from the point of view of subsidies or giving a way of free input to farmers. But as they say, no pain, no gain. When farmers are given inputs free of charge, and this I observed in Uganda, they don't complain if the seeds are not certified or if the livestock has some disease or if they're given mangoes instead of the potato seedlings they're looking for it's a gift, you don't complain about gifts. I used to talk to my counterparts in agriculture and my counterparts in local government and the counterparts in water and the counterparts in the road system. There are about six ministries who are all involved in agriculture and needed to pull together more than they did. So I once said that we should have not the Ministry of Agriculture but the Ministry of Agribusiness within the Ministry responsible for the national economy. I think agriculture, agribusiness is that important. Governments by the way, by means of being the biggest single-spender in any country, I think what they can do for agribusiness is to concentrate on those bulky public goods. The private sector cannot or will not spend on. And I come to your third question here, Kundi. What can they spend on to make a difference in agriculture? The feeder roads. You have nice shiny tarmac highways but many times you don't have the feeder roads to bring the produce from the farms to the highway. We had instances before we started on our road redevelopment program. You had farmers throwing away milk in one part of the country because they couldn't get it to the roadside. And in another part of the country you had children who had malnourishment because they weren't getting enough protein. That is changing now that we're working on the roads. Every road should have a tag. Is it for agriculture? Is it for tourism? Is it for easing cost of transport? Then the other second area where they should spend is on irrigation. Appropriate irrigation. We all like to think of dams. In fact we've got three big dam schemes in Uganda that have done wonders for the efficiency or productivity of rice. You may have heard of one which is called Dolo. Dolo went from, the farmers said they went from 27 bags per unit of water used. I forget what it was. Two fifty-eight bags once the big hydro scheme had been redeveloped and reopened and it was being managed by the farmers. Not by the government, not by the Ministry of Water and Environment but by the farmers. That's the second thing. The farmers need to be involved. The other area where government should work is in rural power for the millers and the processors. All too often you get rice being trucked to compete with husks and all the other heavy residues which are not so profitable over our roads to the mills in the urban centres where it could be easily semi-processed closer to home if they had the rural power. And this would also help to roll out rural power because if you had rural power doing things like rice processing that could be paid for, then you could add on the lifeline for people to light their homes and turn to do their homework. If you roll out rural power just for people to get home lighting and for people to do their homework, very worthy objectives but you should have a productive use attached to that that can help meet the costs of the rural power roll out. The other area where government should spend time, if not money is on the human resource, as the President has just said. Extension services. These are so important but we tend to neglect them. Extension services, you have to make the farmers educated. You have to help them pronounce what their problem is. What are the diseases that they're facing? What are the pests? What is stopping them from getting 70, 80, 90% return on their seeds or on their livestock? Research and development. But it has to be targeted. I got tired in Uganda of reading on page one of the newspaper. Scientists in Kawanda, which is one of our research centres come through with a new disease resistant maze or cassava or rice variety. And then on page seven, cassava mosaic or dry rice pest breaks out in northern Uganda or eastern Uganda or wherever. A mismatch. How do you get the fruits of the labs into the field? We need to have more linkages between the farmers and the scientists to make sure that scientists work on the problems perceived by farmers in the fields. Not on the problems that scientists are interested in or, God forbid, what the development partners are interested in. So yes, the government can spend more money on the right things, which is where they have a natural advantage, the bulky public goods, the climate change factors the President has just mentioned now. I'll give you an example where as government a lot of change increased efficiency without spending a single cent. And this was in an area that is of interest to rice producers. It was in infrastructure. We had something between Uganda, Kenya and Randa, a regional project called the Northern Karidou Infrastructure Project. How to improve transition time and cost of moving goods from Mombasa to Nairobi, Kampala, which is our capital, and Kigali, the capital of Randa. Why was a container costing a thousand dollars, let's say between China and Mombasa, and then $2,000 between Mombasa and Uganda? I'm exaggerating a bit, but it was in those regions. So we persuaded, when I say we, the other ministers of finance of East Africa, we made sure to work very closely together, partly because as the Minister for Finance of Kenya then, Uhuru Kenyatta, who's now the President, he said, listen, everybody hates the ministers of finance. Everybody hates us. So we have to love each other.  So we worked together and we persuaded our presidents to let us handle the Northern Karidou problem. And without spending a single cent, without a single procurement bid being opened, we brought down the transition time for Kampala, Mombasa Kampala, we brought it down from 30 days to listen for it, seven, when we did a test run. How did we do this without any expenditure? First of all, we got the Ministers of Internal Affairs, to call off the police roadblocks. There were five in Kenya, three in Uganda, between Mombasa and Kampala. We said, what are the roadblocks for? Why are you stopping trucks that are clearly coming up from the port that you can scan and see there's no guns or other security issues in there? Why are you stopping them from going, going where they're going? So they took away the roadblocks. They just had one outside Mombasa. And the next one, a Uganda truck encountered, was at the border into Uganda. And then after that, they were into the holding pen in the Revenue Authority in Kampala. The second thing we did was to make sure the Ministers of Transport aligned the axle load requirements. Because in Kenya, you had an axle load of, I think it was 24 tons per axle. And in Uganda, it was 28. And in Rwanda, I think it was 29 or 30. The truck was spending all their time stuffing and destoughing their cargo. The third area we made, the Revenue Authority of Kenya, which was about to procure a new system, we made sure they procured the same system that we had in Uganda and Rwanda. Much to their outrage, but they did. So all the Revenue Authorities were on the same system. The minute your goods landed in Mombasa, you could be told what you owe. You could pay in Kampala, and then your goods would come through all the way into Uganda. And the last bit we looked at was to allow electronic surveillance of the trucks. If a truck was heading for Kampala, but then the truck at the satellite showed it was heading for southern Sudan, yes, then would let the police do a roadblock. So by involving these ministries and coercing them to work together, we brought down the cost of transport. I don't know whether it's still working now because we had to sort of be checking on it every day. We can do the same for rice production. By bringing together the rice input dealers, the farmers, the warehouse owners, the transporters, the rice buyers, both inside and outside the country, the processors and the six ministries involved. I can tell you more about the six ministries later on if you want. So, yes, we were spending money on agriculture. We need to realign where we're spending the money for rice. And we need to coordinate with the private sector so that they take the responsibility, more of the responsibility for inclusion, financial inclusion, and roll out of all the technological improvements we hear about. Thank you. Thank you very much, Sean. Question for Professor Gulati. What impact does the increasing importance of non-farm income have on the resilience of farm households and their ability to manage risks? We also heard from President Hongbo and Maria Chauhanuka about technology and innovations. Now, do they make it easier for farmers having cost-effective means and insurance products? How much can these be really helping households, farm households, to manage risks? Again, this is something you have a lot of experience, not only in India and other parts of the region here. We'll really be looking forward to hear your thoughts. Well, thanks for having me on this panel.  Coming from India, which is the second-largest producer of rice, 113 million tons last year, the population where it is growing and by 2024 we are likely to be surpassing China's population. So the pressure on food systems is quite a lot. Shanking holding size, latest as 1.1 hectare is the average size of the holding. Now, within this, if you rely just on rice or any other crop, except maybe floric culture or some high-value perishable crops where the risk is high, you're not going to make your both ends meet. Therefore, the latest survey that has been done in the country, 2015-16, shows that average farmer household income, only 40% of that comes from farming crops and animals. Together, 60% is coming from somewhere else. About 53% is coming from wages and salaries. Now, those wages and salaries could be on other farms but also outside the farming system and about 7-8% is coming from doing non-farm business. So that's the structure. And therefore, we were seeing that even during drought years India was hit by back-to-back droughts in 2014 and 2015. Yes, agriculture was under stress, but literally large-scale starvation or that factor and India was still exporting, India is the biggest exporter of rice despite all these problems. So, your question is that there is already a diversification taking place in income levels. Same thing I hear about China. China is even more because people move out of agriculture to construction and other sectors and that's a normal process of development. Your other part of the question, are there any insurance products and other things? I think India revamped its crop insurance system in 2016. It's called the Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bhima Yojna, Prime Minister's Crop Insurance Scheme and the target is that in the next four or five years 100 million hectares must come under crop insurance because overall, roughly about 48% of the crop area in the country is irrigated. Rest is dependent on rains and rains come, you know, 75% of the rains come in a window of three to four months and that is if they fail, there is a crisis. So, crop insurance has come in but crop insurance, if you look around the world, whether it is China or whether it is US, US is about 123 million hectares under crop insurance. Farmers cannot take the full premium on that. Even US subsidizes 60 to 70% of the crop insurance premium. China is even more subsidization and China is still touching about 100 million hectares inching towards that. India at present is about 50 million hectares under crop insurance and it has announced where the farmers will give only 2% of the premium and the rest will be shared between the central government and the state government in equal portions, roughly about 85% subsidy, 80, 85% subsidy because the overall premium is still 10 to 11% but as the scaling up takes place, we do expect the premiums to come down with better forecasting and, you know, methods. But one thing on the production side and resilience side I do want to mention that there is a big role of technology. Technology has been doing a lot in terms of developing, you know, drought resistant or drought tolerant and flood tolerant crop varieties. India on its own, I think in 2017, the released crop variety, it's called Dhan 801 which is supposed to be very resilient to stress of climate change and still can give you about 9 tons per hectare, the potential yield of that. But then what is known about India on the climate change, well, temperatures will rise and you're going to have more frequency and intensity, higher intensity of droughts and floods, certain parts, more droughts and therefore these technologies and we have to learn the biggest challenges going to be how do we deal with water and how to get more crop from every drop of water. I was talking to Oxfam and the Booth, the SRI technique, they say about 20 to 50% water saving can be there depending upon how much was being misused. The Jain irrigation Booth outside has been doing very fascinating work almost for 10 years. The pilots, we have heard about drip irrigation in horticulture, in sugarcane, in India Maharashtra about 25% is under drip but they have been doing under rice and in water stressed areas where water table is going down by about 70 centimetres each year and their results are very heartening. About 50 to 60% water can be saved if you go for drip in rice. Now, I have not seen really drip in rice at any large scale anywhere in the world. I think if supporting policies come in if you keep giving free water and free electricity and all those things subsidies then who is interested in saving water so you have to change the behavioural pattern of the farmers by giving them incentives if you save on power, if you save on water you will get these rewards so you can change the policies in such a manner that the adoption of these technologies can save on water you will have to buffer stock water as well as food grains with more volatility because of climate change so these are the policies I think a large country like India from buffer stocking of grains to buffer stocking of water whether in the reservoirs or groundwater and using better techniques to get more from every crop of water I think these are the things in which India is going forward. Thank you. Thank you very much, Professor Velathi. So we talked about resilience let's now move to another topic trade and markets international rice trade as you know continues to grow steadily over the last several years it reached close to 48 million tonnes in 2017 compared to just about 8 million tonnes during the early 1970s so the use of international trade in rice can help to manage the risk of shortfalls in domestic production especially with climate change and many countries rely upon it for supplies but it still also remains a contentious and controversial issue every time and I meet with ministers of agriculture and be as economists talk about grow things where you have a comparative advantage I improve productivity otherwise import when the prices are double of the international prices why would you continue they are pretty emotional they say that food self-sufficiency perhaps is one of the biggest priority and even recently just coming from in a larger regional event the Malaysia which has spent a lot in terms of diversification now they were also talking about food self-sufficiency on the rice so I'd like us to discuss a little bit about this issue of trade and markets but before we also talk about we also need to keep in mind that more than 90% of world's rice production remains within national borders and it is only traded domestically so all this excitement is only for that little sport where we all talk about with that fact in mind President Hungbu, I'd like to ask you a question what are the main constraints to making domestic rice value chains more inclusive for smallholder farmers and what are the main differences in ifad's approaches to the problems in Asia Africa and Latin America what are the commonalities and what are the differences and how do you sort of treat them and approach them differently Thank you so much in terms of the main constraint I will identify maybe three types first of all at the organizational level then the financial and the technical it might look at the organizational level it might look quite basic but making sure that the farmers organizations are very well structured very well trained to the different value chains is quite critical on that and once they are very well organized that will make it easier for them to aggregate their produce if you don't aggregate it it's going to be obviously difficult for you to compete in terms of accessing to the market that you refer to and if they are also well organized they can also have a better negotiation of the price of all the inputs that they need for the production and that in Phoenix has a direct impact when it comes to the time to deal with the food systems another dimension is the organizational challenge is the post harvest if you take for example the storage if they are not very well organized it's going to be difficult for them to really tackle the whole storage challenges that either the technical know how it's not there or when it's there it could be very expensive for them to do it alone better when you do it in the cooperatives or alike and then the second category I will touch on is the financial which is quite very critical you know if we want them to be able to to have the value chain to be very inclusive they have to be able to participate also at the different ladder of the value chain be it for the transformation from the production up to the market and they need to be able to have access to the finance resources not as just as a grant but even as loans or alike for them to be able to finance the basic transformation and the third category is the technical the technical is also where the technology comes to play the importance of meeting the standard could be the international standard or if it's at the domestic level also the domestic standard they are struggling on that we have to to recognize and once you are able to meet the national standard or the regional standard to be able to lift it up and meet the international standard is also something that we notice on the ground is also challenging you also ask if we do have any kind of regionalized approach not really per se because you really have to look at the issue based on the community that you are dealing with or the country that you are dealing with and your response is always based on that bottom-up approach but over the years you can realize that you do have some common either common constraints or common opportunities one of it and what the professor just touched on is the whole debate on the subsidies and at the end of the day when small holders depend if because of production or how much they can sell abroad and how does that compare with the huge subsidies that we know very well in several OECD countries so that is a challenge that you see from Africa to Asia and Latin America is a challenge so what you are trying to do while some of those problems are difficult let's say and politically very sensitive and so forth but at least is to encourage the sub-regional market so which means that if the ASEAN of this world or the Commissar of this world or the Sadec of this world if we fund the sub-regions you can have a better organization and to make sure that you can facilitate that 5-10% that you are talking about trade outside the national borders will also be a solution and my final point on that I cannot insist enough in the human capital again the human capital is also what we see from kind of repeating constraints from one region to another and that is going to be very critical Thank you very much I am going to now to Professor Gulati how reliable is the world rice market as a source of supplies and I ask that because every time when you post this question to Ministers of Agriculture or for Prime Ministers you have been there in that job too they do not trust the global markets to help them when they need it so how reliable is the world rice market and are you optimistic that exporting country governments can refrain from trade restriction that disrupt the functioning of the world rice market and given declining groundwater tables and increasing demand for water from other sectors of the economy how sustainable are India's rice exports Okay I understand what you are hinting at 2007-08 you know one good thing is that over a period of time if you look at where the global rice market was you yourself said 8 million tons to 48 million tons even as a percentage of overall production it has grown so with all the hiccups in the system we are moving towards gradual opening up of the system and trading now if the global economy is smooth or some marginal ups and downs every country can adjust there is a tolerance limit of every country 10% 15% today one of the panel speakers could not come here because the rice price in that country has suddenly gone up more than the tolerance limit similar thing happens in large countries when there are tectonic shifts in the price of rice and that's what happened in 2007-08 rice price went up by more than double which country that has one of the largest concentration of poor in the world also can adjust they would have been all exposed and then at home people will be starving would the political leaders allow that every political leader has to first protect its own poor so this is where the dilemma is today India is the largest exporter of rice in the world 12.7 million tons of rice was exported in 1718 it's valued at 7.7 billion dollars out of this rice basmati rice the high value was about 4.1 million tons valued at 4.2 billion dollars the rest 8.5 8.6 million tons common rice which is exported quite a bit to Africa too was valued only 3.5 billion dollars now if it is a high value market there is no threat of export restrictions because it is less quantity high value every country that has surplus can export that but that goes to the Gulf countries where there is hardly any water but what goes to the poor countries and India including which consumes quite a lot of the common rice this is where the hiccups are if the world prices go up by 25% and domestic prices take a lift of 25% there is a problem at home and that's where the restrictions start coming in to your question how much countries can rely on imports I would say India learnt lessons way back in mid 60s that it cannot rely even on food aid a large country like India when it was hit in 1960s back to back drought it was a ship to mouth story the entire foreign exchange of the country could not buy more than 7 million tons of wheat and we were importing 11 million the food grain production dropped by 17 million tons at that time the country was in real trouble PL 480 from US food aid but when food aid comes it has some political strings and that's what lesson India learnt and it said we must have self sufficiency in our basic staples, rice and wheat and today India is producing 100 million tons of wheat sometimes we import, sometimes we export but not that dependence even on food aid trade so the large countries particularly Singapore can afford it's not even one fourth of Delhi population so they can import any quantity if they have the money but large countries will have to keep a sufficient buffer at home to deal with the volatility so I would suggest if Philippines is having any problem they need to have a buffer stocking strategy but unfortunately buffer stocking in most of the countries went in through para-statals high inefficiency, wastages but you know volatility whether you can deal directly with trade partly yes fully question mark how much buffer stocking you need to have India has gone in for the right to food I think it came from you and it has passed an act that 67% of the population has to be given rice and wheat at literally 10% of the cost so their resilience but the question of trade will remain somewhat erratic somewhat unreliable despite all these factors the overall trade globally has increased so we should look towards the positive side it reliance fully on that at this stage of development at that levels of income in different countries different levels of population make question mark let me ask you a follow up question Prof. Hungbo was talking about I mean honourable Mr. President was talking about regional entities could play a big role what's the scope for a regional policy on the rice sector from a food self-sufficiency perspective I'm just coming from an ASEAN agriculture minister's conference where they are collaborating on a whole range of issues on agriculture but when it comes to rice sector is that possible? I'll give you what happened in 2007-8 when the prices globally went up along with even Vietnam or China a number of countries started putting restrictions we have a neighbour which has wonderful objective function of maximising gross national happiness beautiful country called Bhutan it was heavily dependent on India's rice exports it's a small country in terms of demand but when India put restrictions on it was all across and very soon within a few days we realised what are we doing this country is heavily dependent on exports from India and they need only little so you see historically within six months Bhutan, Bangladesh they were given their special quotas at a price of $400 a ton and the market price globally had gone to more than $700 a ton so I think the sensitivities of the region and you have to live with your partners and your neighbours more would be needed to build a consensus on that that what type of arrangement can be built but countries are not insensitive so I think more work can be done on that and you can create your own where there are importers and exporters and in an amicable fashion but more work I think should lead that type of work Thank you for giving us homework Minister Chauhanuka rice imports are rising in nearly all Sub-Saharan African countries and most countries are also far removed from self-sufficiency for example Eastern and Western Africa alone import 35% are more of their domestic consumption with any even higher shares in Middle and Southern Africa given that rice is not a traditional food in most of Africa how politically important is rice self-sufficiency to African governments Thank you very much Actually I'm not quite sure why I should start because in Uganda, in East Africa we're sort of the opposite Uganda in East Africa rice is now the second most important staple after MACE so it is very important to our governments and rice is the most important staple for the urban populations and in Africa the urban populations are always what the governments are most sensitive about so rice is a favorite food of the favored demographic so yes, rice is very important to our countries we have a interesting situation in East Africa we have a tariff system for commodities that is supposed to favor domestic production and inter East African trade so for instance, rice from Uganda to Kenya would take and in fact I don't think there's even any tariff on foodstuffs but rice from Pakistan or India would attract a tariff so this is where there's a lot of fun in games right now Kenya has just lifted an embargo on Uganda's sugar because they had got themselves convinced that we were importing cheap sugar from Cuba and re-exporting it to them as Ugandan sugar so they had to test the DNA did you know that sugar has a DNA they had to test the DNA of the sugar and then they said yes this sugar has grown in Uganda not in Cuba so it can pass Kenya and Tanzania have an ongoing fight with rice right now Tanzania is forbidding Tanzania is forbidding rice imports from Kenya because they're convinced that Kenya is importing rice from Pakistan and they're under a preferential agreement which Kenya has with Pakistan to sell them tea and Pakistan sells them rice and they're saying that rice should have the we should put a tariff on it because you're getting it from outside of East Africa and we had a small snuff with Egypt recently because of the Nile River Nile which has its head waters in Uganda the percentage of cubic meters of water that's supposed to go out minimum per day out from the dams through Sudan Ethiopia and then to Egypt but we had a drought in one of my years as minister and the power 95-90% of our power is generated from hydro so the power generation was very much affected and the tariffs were going up and the power outages were going through the roof so I called the minister for water and environment and I asked her I said can't you increase can't you increase the flow through the power turbines and she said no I can't because in that abrogate our agreement with Egypt to conserve the water this time it was conserving the water and I said what agreement is this and she said oh it's a now it's a new initiative and 11 countries have signed on to it and I said well minister I've got 40 million Ugandans without power and which do you think is going to cost your job first so she said okay I'll open the slew skates so she opened the slew skates and she worked it out with Egypt so I do believe all these tariffs can be worked out in Uganda again we are fortunate to have a very favorable agricultural climate we are very naughty boys and girls in Uganda we should be feeding the whole of Africa by now and so we have rice exports we export rice and import rice so according to one set of figures again our date is not too good but according to one set of figures in 2012 we imported 130,000 tons of rice 1% of India's and we exported at the same time 120 tons so we imported just a little bit more than we were exporting so it means that we don't have the production parameters right maybe we're growing what we don't like maybe we prefer basmati to what we call Kaiso which is our local super green we also have Nerika rice which was developed in conjunction with Japan in Uganda and it's upland rice you don't need to flood the paddy fields so it's much more resistant to climate change and to transmission of diseases but again I went to Senegal and I found Nerika growing very well in Senegal better than in Uganda and they told me oh we got these seeds from Uganda I said but why are they growing better here than in Uganda maybe we're too fortunate but I think rice trade in East Africa and Africa is very very important for two reasons first of all rice is now the favored staple and one reason because it takes much less energy to cook you can cook a kilo of rice in 15-20 minutes the way we cook our traditional staples banana it takes half the day with firewood because firewood gives it a nice aroma so you got less power consumption it's easier to package easier to certify so rice is here to stay and might become the most important staple in East Africa and Uganda has the best advantage in growing rice so I'm looking at it more from that point of view to import substitution we should go into Basmati production more so we can save the 45 million dollars that we used in porting rice two years ago the potential for upland rice means it can now grow through a big area of Uganda Northern Uganda is slightly less water favored than Southern Uganda but because of upland rice they're now growing a lot of upland rice but this is where we get into the linkages our rice is being sold very very cheaply at the farm gate by the farmers to the traders who then sell it much more expensively in Nairobi or Dar Salam so that's where our focus is same with maize you get the farmer accepting 500 shillings a kilo at the farm gate and in Nairobi it's going for 2,000 shillings a kilo right now we've got a problem the price of maize not rice but the price of maize it's gone so low that the farmers aren't planting so what's going to happen next year when there's no rice being planted this year for next year so again with the storage the prices are going to go up so again I think storage is more of our problem but I think the reason why I'm very much keen on rice trade in the region and across the continent is because this can be a very good area for employment employment of the youth employment of the women employment of the rural people and through growing more rice we can have more what I call near farm occupation milling, transportation bringing it on inputs if we take a holistic approach I think rice right now to me is the most important staple for us to concentrate on in Uganda and East Africa because that's what you need for the economic sustainable economic development which I always translate as meaning more jobs at higher value added for more Ugandans across more of the country if something fulfills that criteria count me in, thank you okay go ahead President Hongbo I just want to bounce back a little bit on one small point which we didn't I said it untouched on both what the professor was saying the quality of the rice when in 2007 and 8 and the basmati was going to the Gulf and the lower quality to other export and what Honourable Minister Maria was talking about comparing the import and the export one challenge that I think you have in Africa certainly is being able to educate the society to consume domestic to consume what is produced locally that is also part of the challenge that you are going to have and you also have an economic dimension to that when the local producer, particularly my small holders at the end of the day, certainly maybe because of productivity when the cost of production or the cost of bringing the rice to the market become slightly higher than the cost of import it can jeopardize the job creation dimension that you are referring to so there is an economic dimension also to that my last point is just to confirm also the political the societal or political impact that the rice could have though the rice is not number one staple food consumption but is quite very politically charged Professor Gulatti I can see now the families are now getting all warmed up go ahead it's very fascinating I do feel even for common rice there is potential for a collaboration or cooperation between East African countries and India there is already a trade going on it can be formalized much more that no restrictions on this quantity at least and we have entered into a similar arrangement with Mozambique to import pulses so even when our prices are lower we are importing at a higher price because that's an agreement so some situation of regional cooperation or even across south-south cooperation I think can be done but your other part of the question earlier was given the water table going down in India are India's rice sustainable it's interesting 12.7 million tons we are exporting even if you take 1 kilogram of rice iri would vouch for 3 to 5,000 litres of irrigation water and in Punjab region the seat of green revolution it's about 5,000 litres of irrigation water maybe 40-50% of that seeps through and again you have to turn it out but anywhere from 4 to 5 billion cubic meters of water is in a way being exported now the question is in Punjab and Haryana where the water table is going down they are switching more and more towards Basmati they are hooked to common rice because there is an assured procurement system that the government has provided I think the moment the government takes that and that's one thing to iri I heard in the morning that you are opening a centre of excellence in Varanasi all the way east of Lucknow to Assam the market prices of paddy are at least 20-25% below minimum support prices and this is prime minister constituency just producing more perhaps we will not take farmers far off unless they get that price and procurement being not there that is their biggest pain and Punjab-Haryana is hooked to procurement because the market risk is minimised I think coupled with hard doses of subsidies on power and so on and so forth so I think technology to raise production has to be combined with marketing access if we don't get them better markets and that is an area where water table is very comfortable and that's an area where productivity is still between 2-2.5 tons per hectare you can take it to 4 tons and for the next 20 years cooperation with Africa or any other neighbours to export so it can be sustainable it will be good for domestic poor as well as for the others I think more innovation and more policy what needs to be done in that I am looking at the time and there is one more topic we have to touch upon so that is on consumption and I don't want to just overlook that maybe I ask Honourable Chauhanuka to give a very brief response on that topic and then we move to the consumption go ahead Honourable Chauhanuka do you want to continue to talk about yes I wanted to you mentioned Iri I wanted to mention one example of collaboration between different stakeholders that is going on in Uganda right now I haven't visited it myself yet but I am told it is doing quite well this is in the area not of rice but it can work in rice too it is an oil palm we are growing palm oil oil palms in Uganda in the islands on Lake Victoria and this is done by Bidco which is a multinational from Kenya but I think they started in India originally Bidco is using out growers to grow oil palms in Kalangala our island area and we all know the trouble the problems associated with oil palms when it comes to resilience and climate change so what happened is that the government collaborated with GIZ the German technical NGO to bring high tech into the oil palm business to make better use of the available resources so as to make sure climate change didn't impact too much so they put in early warning systems they started data collection they are using drones to help the farmers you know collect data what is happening when where you are planting where is the water located all this data is being captured stored in I'm told the cloud and they manipulated from there and then the farmers get into a collective to link with the government and the private sector Bidco to see how the results can be used to improve the farming practice in each of the farms so this is an example of small holders with the government the big private sector and an NGO all working together to improve the efficiency of usage of resources because don't get me wrong Uganda we have problems with water and drought and everything so this is one way of trying to make sure that the oil palm oil business is sustainable and this I think is something that can be exported to the rice area and another example from Uganda is what the president calls the four acre model again it's for small holders where by there most of them are small holders of even less than four acres so big commercial farms in Uganda can't work very well right now because of our land tenure system so what they are encouraging the small holders to do is to divide let's say you have four acres divide your acres into four one acre will do a cash crop another acre will do fodder for your zero grazing livestock a third acre will look at fruit and vegetables for the local markets for you to get in already cash while you wait for the main cash crop to come in and the fourth acre will be for your home consumption your subsistence farming this has got some very good reviews but there have also been some mixed reviews but I just wanted to mention this that this is somewhere by their trying to help the small holders who include most of the rice growers see how can they deal with things like pests and soil exhaustion how can they get they reckon they will be able to get about $700 per family per month using the four acre system so this is something to watch out for okay thank you very much just to touch on the last topic and since consumption is equally important largely from a nutrition perspective let me ask President Hongberg how is EFOD working to make food and agri business value chain more nutrition sensitive because this whole aspect of nutrition sensitiveness is something that we are all talking about from EFOD's work can you share with us your perspectives from consumption and nutrition dimension I think this is where you really need to bring much more different parameters together and the consumption first of all in our project our target is to make sure that even all our existing project by the end of 2021 50% of them are made nutrition sensitive and moving forward it's going to progressively be 100% because it's quite crucial the dimension you want to really bring together here is that first of all it's important to make sure that the small holders let's remember that 70% in Asia 80% in Africa of the total food is produced by the small holders where you have the most the poorest people in the world so sometimes there might be producing very nutritious staple just for as a cash crop and for them to still having children stunting so it's important to raise our awareness first of all and in terms of the need to make sure we have a balanced diet when we talk about food security it's not just in terms of the quantity of calories that you're taking I believe it's important secondly in the policy making and trying to drive for what you want to produce it's quite important to bring also into consideration those are the nutritious food that you really want the country to produce or even to export a very, very good example listening to the Honourable Minister is that the palm oil in Uganda which is actually an EFAT project you will have to look at it from that dimension as well as the job creation dimension as well as the environmental and social impact dimension which is a very, very difficult subject and compare that to doing similar thing for the rice or for this facet or for maize or other staple before you make that decision I was very much impressed by what we hear from Honourable Minister Wong this morning about talking about the glycemic index in rice you have to recognize that more and more this is an issue that people are concerned not only in the region but worldwide so what we are doing at this EFAT and we work on that a lot with other colleagues on this we are not sure that our financing primarily in discussion of the government and the financing goes to those staple food that are more nutritious sensitive keeping in mind the other dimension that I referred to i.e. the environmental and social impact as well as the job creation the job creation dimension and finally what we are also trying to embed is to look at the nutrition dimension as well as the climate agriculture and what we didn't talk a lot about is the gender dimension to the transformative the gender transformation dimension of the nutrition issue the impact on the mothers and the child bearing bearing problem that we have in the world for bringing the gender dimension as well what are the implications of dietary diversification for rice scientists and policy makers many of them are here well in your opening remarks you said that the per capita consumption of rice is coming down so is the per capita consumption of wheat or cereals, core cereals to start with you know when your incomes rise you go from cereal based diet system to more of nutrition animal products milk, meat fish and also vitamins, fruits and vegetables so this is a natural process in Indian case it's very interesting today 60% of the calories are being derived from cereal group India has experienced over the last 15 years 7 to 8% rate of overall GDP growth and we hope in the next 15 years also India will continue on that path now as the incomes rise people are going to go away from cereals and more of these products will India go in a big way towards meat the way Chinese system has gone or much of the western system has gone or even Africa would go I have my serious reservations in India only 8% less than 8% people consume beef that's a sacrosanct thing only 16% 15% go for lamb the highest is 38% chicken 38% population chicken is a very efficient converter of energy 1.6 kilograms of grain to 1 kg of compared to beef or pork or any other so India's food security safety wall is it something called vegetarianism but having said that I think if we have to remove malnutrition at a very fast pace FAO's latest report says 15% of Indians are undernourished children 38% are stunted the soils are deficient in zinc and that leads to deficiency of zinc in rice and wheat and that leads to stunting so I think science is giving one example where they are breeding more of zinc rich varieties I think Iri has done that in 2016 ICAR India released C.R.Dhan 45 which is zinc rich but interestingly in 2016 C.R.Dhan 310 which is protein rich normally 7-8% protein but this is plus 10% so you can bring in those the latest of which I am a guinea pig nowadays interestingly India has brought black blue and purple wheat it is not rice in rice congress talking about wheat but that has higher iron content higher zinc content and eight times higher antioxidants so I am personally on trial everyday I am eating that wheat so I think science has to give us answers that instead of diversification which is much more expensive process because affording meat and other things are much more expensive if we can bio fortify the basic staples of course they have to be safe but that way we can reach the masses which have lower incomes and where the challenge of malnutrition is much more I think that is where we need to invest more and madam that is where agriculture R&D gives the maximum returns in terms of climate resilience and increasing productivity but also improving nutrition of those who are most vulnerable thank you very much let me turn to you as a last point on this one honourable Chauhanuka you are a business woman too so do rice farmers need to adapt a more entrepreneurial mindset and what are your thoughts on that thank you very much I would like to agree with the professor and the president that the way to go on rice is to fortify the rice yield improve the efficiency of the yield more rice per present unit of production but then you would increase the off farm jobs which would then give you the money to buy in the other dietary needs but as far as entrepreneurship of the rice farmers is concerned yes yes and yes again I mentioned to the professor earlier that I think that if adds main main goal which I totally agree with is to make sure you may not have put it this way but that's the way I see it make sure that every farmer every small holder becomes an SME in their own right a small or medium sized enterprise a small businessman or business woman how to do that just like you do with any other field of business you need to big business small, medium and large size enterprises but just that since 95% of the households in Uganda employ less than 4 people I tend to look at the smaller size companies but the way to do it is to for the government to take on more of the extension services the research and the training of the farmers we need to resuscitate our demonstration farms which they're doing now to bring back the demonstration farms so the farmers can actually see practices going on practically we've now got video vans going around the villages and most of the videos are featuring women commentators why because it's been proven that the women farmers or the women cultivators respond better to messages coming from their fellow women so we're having women explain the practices in the local languages to the farmers we need to encourage more of the financial services to be accessible to farmers the reason why they're expensive is because they don't have the data a bank does not have the data to assess the risk so they automatically put it into the high risk category they need to also look more at how the seasonality of the farmers operations it's not for nothing that the word crop finance has become synonymous with bridge financing because the farmer gets his income in a certain time of the year but at the other time of the year he's got to pay the school fees, medical expenses etcetera so we need to develop more products with that seasonality in mind we need to make sure that the FinTech battle going on between the banks and the telecommunications companies is resolved in favour of lower still lower unit costs for not just borrowing money but for getting project assistance project appraisal for after this is one reason why we're advocating financing according to Islamic principles in Uganda where the bank or the financial house takes a stake in the project rather than just sitting back to wait for the interest payments at the end of the month the third area we need to look at is post harvest what is the marketing information again data is coming to help here why now farmers can look at their cell phones and see what is the price of maize or rice in Nairobi, in Kampala in Dar Salam they may not be able to do anything about it but at least they have the knowledge of what the trader can get for their rice in the ultimate market and also the more coordination between the various ministries responsible for rural roads for extension services and even for skilling of the children because one problem we've had in Uganda it's changing now but one problem was a perception agriculture was looked at as something for the failures for people who were not educated and it does not need to be that way I'll give you an anecdote just to close very quickly we had we borrowed money from the Belgian government to open up four vocational schools to deal with carpentry, electricals machine operating and so on and as usual we had a big press conference to announce the loan and the journalists were all educated by the way among the more educated people of the country when it came to question time they asked me but all these carpenters electricians where is the government going to employ them we said but it's not the government going to employ them they're going to be employed by themselves in the private sector and I said but who's going to employ these people who could not get into university I don't kid you not someone said that these guys couldn't you know get into university they're not very brainy they're not going to who's going to employ them as carpenters or electricians and I said hold on a minute first of all many people do not go to university just because they're not in enough places or secondly because maybe their skills lie outside of university I said all of you here have a university degree they said here I said who paid for university was it someone who had a university degree or someone who did not who paid for you your mother your father the local bigwig the local banker who paid for you and they said our parents and what occupations do your parents have tailor taxi driver farmer machine operator electrician plumber I said so these people are good enough and to get the money to pay for your education and you think they cannot be good enough to run a carpentry business electricity business I said who do you borrow money from from each other or from people in the vocational services when did any of you last have a good plumber or reliable electrician to wire your house and we close the conference on that note thank you very much Honourable Chauhanuka again I thank all the three panel members for an absolutely fascinating discussion and I wish we had more time to take from the audience but just looking at our time we almost come to a close the discussion actually covered a lot of ground but just trying to summarize the key points would actually be too difficult so and I won't try however the points three points touching on the issue of production trade and consumption with climate change threatening to become worse making farmers more resilient will become more important over time so the emphasis relating to investing in human capital technology must be affordable as you mentioned and also building institutions are something that the panel has emphasized similarly on international rice trade will become more important in the future the regional approaches to international trade is something that we need to look at if there is scope and potential for that production diversification is important for achieving BSDGs particularly in eradicating malnutrition and ending hunger but if you want to bring that dietary diversification to the very poor how do we get into high value crops we heard a lot from the panel in terms of what governments can do but at the same time private sector and all of us need to be putting together in a much more holistic way so I trust that the audience enjoyed this as much as I did and I hope that you will keep this in mind some of the insights that gained from this discussion throughout the duration of this congress and into your future work work that is so important for future generations of rice producers and consumers before closing this discussion I'd like to ask two more quick wrap up questions of all the panelists let me put you on the spot you came here so you had to get a little bit more out of you first what trends are developments that concern you most about the future of the rice sector over the next 20 years second what trends are developments make you optimistic about the future of the rice sector over the next 20 years you have only one minute for both these questions first Honourable Minister Chauhanuka one minute can you give me the two questions again please I was saying what trends are development concern you most about the future of the rice sector over the next 20 years and what trends are developments make you optimistic about the future of the rice sector the next 20 years no elaborate answers just gut instinct one gives me concern is that we need to work much quicker to improve the yield of rice in Uganda because of climate change we must not let the farmers be discouraged when they produce low yielding disease prone or pest prone rice that is my concern we have to raise ahead of the climate change factor to increase output of rice from the same acreage that is being used now because there is not much acreage left to expand into more rice cultivation what gives me most hope the advent of data analysis the advent realisation by agriculture is that they do need to do cost benefit analysis and the glimmering that at the end of the tunnel there is a realisation that agriculture is agribusiness and must be treated like a business not just food security but as a business to produce surplus food that will go into the market because the housewife who is selling 10 onions in the local market that for me is a business woman okay thank you President Humphill one minute sure what would be my concern maybe it is one of the last topics we discussed i.e. the nutrition dimension I think it is going to be important to make sure that other staples at one point are not deemed to be much more nutritious than rice if this is the case you may see the risk of substitution on that and then what gives me much more hope is the work that Iri and the colleague are doing because they will provide a solution to make sure that that competition in terms of the nutrition component that we have thank you you have the last word well I feel the best is yet to come what we did in the last 60 years we are going to do better in the next 30 years challenge climate change answer precision agriculture agro biotechnology also to nutrition so I think the frontiers of biotechnology are going to be at our service and we will be doing much better than we have done during the days of green revolution and others thank you very much please join me in thanking the panel members for a very fascinating discussion a video of this event will be accessible soon so please share it on social media with this be close let's give the panel a big hand