The Multilateral Dimension of Food Security May 12, 2010

Transcription

1 Agriculture Sector Seminar Series The Multilateral Dimension of Food Security May 12, 2010 Participants Speaker: David Hegwood Sponsor United States Agency for International Development: Agriculture Office Page 1 of 16

2 David Hegwood: So with that said, we are shifting gears a little bit. And what my objective is this morning is really to get some feedback from you, the people who ve been working in this area for a long time. Usually, when we I think you all know what the Food Security Initiative is and kind of the background of it and how we re going about implementing it, so I don t want to spend time going through the initiative itself. But what I would like to do is focus on the multilateral dimension because usually what I ve seen working on this the last few months is that we spend a lot of time focused on how to implement the initiative, which really means how are we going to get the money out the door, get the projects going in the field, what our missions are doing, which is all very important. But I think now it would be useful to step back, pan out a little bit and look at a broader context for the initiative and some of the other actors because one of the things that tends to get lost when we focus so exclusively on and so intensely on the field and getting our projects going is that we re not the only ones doing this. There s this is a multilateral initiative that is as I mentioned, came out of the G8 process and has a lot of high-level interest because of the origins of the food security concerns and the food price crisis of a couple of years ago and the ongoing economic situation. So what I d like to do is present my thoughts on what the multilateral dimensions of food security are, and then pose some questions and get some feedback from you to kind of get a reality check for me, as well as to perhaps stimulate some thinking on the part of others in the agency on this topic. First, why do we even care about this? Why are we concerned about multilateral cooperation? Well, I ve got a few thoughts on that subject. One, we ve made a commitment as an administration, as a government, to be more engaged multilaterally. And, certainly, I think I ve heard a lot of this mostly recently at the Rome Food Summit that was held back in November. There was a tremendous almost sense of relief that the US was back in the room and actively engaged and actually putting resources behind the commitments that had been made. Now there s another side to that. People aren t always happy that were there engaged and driving the process forward in the direction that we d take it. But nevertheless, I think there is a real commitment on the part of the administration to engage multilaterally and to be seen as a good player in the multilateral environment. The second is I think we all recognize we can t do it all. There s been one estimate of the funding gap for food security just for sub-sahara in Africa Page 2 of 16

3 calculated by IFPRI. It s around incremental $35 billion a year. Our pledge at La Quilla was $3.5 billion over three years. Total pledge at La Quilla was $22 billion over three years. So that doesn t count national government expenditures. But it s clear that there s a much greater need than certainly the US government has resources to fill, and probably even that all the donors collectively have the resources to fill. So, obviously, the more that we can work together in a multilateral context, the better we can efficiently allocate the limited resources that are available. And third, the Rome principles and the La Quilla principles commit us to a new way of doing business. And, basically, we re following a country-led approach to the development of investment plans, country-led country decision-making, country-led decision-making on food security investments. And lining up behind the country-led decisions on food security investment should be the donor resources, getting it aligned with the decisions that have been made at the country level. What that implies, of course, is that the donors have to get together and talk to each other, talk to the national government. So there s a certain level of multilateral cooperation that s necessarily implied simply by the fact that we have agreed to pursue this new path for agricultural development. Furthermore, we could the Rome principles and the La Quilla principles also call for greater multilateral engagement, use of multilateral institutions in pursuing our food security objectives. So, clearly, there s a mandate to be more engaged multilaterally with the World Bank, with FAO and IFAD and all the other institutions that are involved in food security. Now normally in a presentation like this, I would consider going through all the institutions and processes kind of in alphabet soup fashion, and that would be very tedious and you d probably all be going out for more coffee. I ve spend a lot of time doing that over the last few months, nine months or so, and have in doing so, I ve kind of distilled what I think are three major rationales for why we need to engage multilaterally, why we need a multilateral approach. One is technical assistance in financing. Two is transparency and accountability. And, three is strategic coordination. Now I m going to go through all three of these things. Technical assistance in financing, I think the CAADP process is a good illustration of how we are using the multilateral engagement to coordinate financing, coordinate technical assistance at the country level in developing investment and developing strategies and implementing programs and projects. The Page 3 of 16

4 CAADP, I m sure most of you are familiar is a framework. It s a process that involves a circumference of African agricultural development program. It falls under the AU the African Union framework. And it involves a comprehensive continental-level process for developing food security investment plans, for encouraging collaboration and peer review among countries in the region. It involves the regional economic entities within Africa, such as ECOWAS and COMESA. And it s a work in progress, but it s a process that essentially gathers the players the institutions within Africa, the countries within Africa, the donor community, and other development partners into a process of developing investment plans, deciding how to fund investment plants, and, ultimately, providing mutual accountability and the results framework. The another example of providing technical assistant in financing is the World Bank trust fund Global Agricultural and Food Security Program. And this is more about direct financing. And this is a new trust fund that was just set up, just announced last month at the World Bank spring meetings. And the World Bank trust fund is meant to fill the funding gap in countries after taking into account the national budgetary investments and the donor investments, the World Bank trust fund can come in and provide funding for some of the gap that s left over. In reality what s happening is that there are limited funds available from other donors at this time. So many countries, many of the countries that are going through the process of developing investment plans are actually looking at the World Bank trust fund as the primary financing mechanism for now. The problem with that is [Laughs] that I has limited funds available. It has now decided it would probably limit its initial allocations to about $50 million per country. So that s not a very big chunk of money for many countries. But it is an example of how countries can pool their resources multilaterally to provided financing to developing countries. Now I think many people thought that this would be a very attractive mechanism for many donors because a lot of donors don t really have the capability to provide in the field technical assistance in agricultural. A lot of donors have gotten rid of their agricultural capabilities over the past few decades and like to use multilateral mechanisms to provide assistance. A lot of donors, for example, in order to try and reach their development financing targets like to contribute money to FAO because they can just sign the check and be done with it and not have to worry about it. It hasn t turned out that way. The World Bank trust fund has five donors at the moment, including the Page 4 of 16

5 US, Canada, Spain, South Korea, and the Gates Foundation. We ve been going around with a tin cup trying to get other donors to pony up, but it s been pretty tough slogging, to be honest, because some donors have an aversion to providing money to trust funds. There are a variety of reasons, but it s been very difficult. Another mechanism that s going in the direction of CAADP, but isn t there yet, is a process that s getting started by the Asian Development Bank, IFAK NFAO, in Asia region. They re working with a handful of countries, including Bangladesh and India. And those three organizations have signed a trilateral agreement which embodies their own principles. And their objective is to provide technical assistance to countries in the region to develop investment plans similar to the way CAADP works, though it s a much less structured and fleshed-out process at this point. What it hasn t done yet is figure out how to take the next step from developing the investment plan to finding the financing, how to get the donors in the room and make commitments to financing. So that s one of the things we ll be looking at is how whether and how we could use this process to supplement out efforts in the region and to create a region-wide approach to pursuing food security investment plans among countries there. There s a big meeting coming up in June ADB is organizing in Manila, July the first week of July to an investor forum where they ll have presentations from a number of the countries that they ve been assisting, including Bangladesh and India. And so that may be where we start seeing the first signs of how this process can move to the next step of providing donor financing based on the investment plans that they re developing. And, finally, another example is the global donor platform for rural development which is a group it started out as mostly Europeans. The US has been a member for a while that has provided a lot of support to the CAADP process over the years, but is grew out of the frustration among many practitioners of agricultural development that the agencies they work for were ignoring agricultural. And so it was kind of advocacy mechanism to encourage more financial and technical assistance to agricultural from their own agencies by corralling their efforts and focusing on advocacy. Okay. The next area I want to talk about is transparency and accountability. I think you re all familiar with a lot of what goes on multilaterally there with the OECD Development Assistance Committee which collect data from donor Page 5 of 16

6 organizations on the financial assistance flows to developing countries. The data that s been collected to date is perhaps not as useful as it could be in the area of agricultural, in food security, but that s changing a lot thanks to the G8 process and the La Quilla follow-up process which is now referred to as the AFSI process. The G8, as you know, has been pretty intensely focused on food security for the last about three sessions, three years. The advantage of the G8 is that they have an established accountability process. They require there s accountability working group. They track the commitments that are made at the G8 by the leaders every year and provide a write-up, and it s reviewed the next year. It s not a very detailed process, but it does provide continuing political level oversight of the commitments that have been made. Now what s happened since the La Quilla meeting is that there s a new group called the AFSI Group which is G8-Plus. It was all the other signatories to the La Quilla Declaration from the last year. And they ve met a few times and have spent the last nine months simply trying to clarify in a single spreadsheet what the comments were that were made at La Quilla, so how to parse out the $22 billion among the different donors. That proved to be amazingly, which perhaps is an indication of how difficult this whole process of transparency and accountability is going to be going forward. The next step in the AFSI process is to start looking at actual disbursements at the country level. They ve put out a call for data on that. Probably for us, and for a lot of donors, is that since last year when we made the commitment we can t actually show any disbursements yet. Most of our money hasn t even been allocated yet. So it s going to take a while for that to really get moving. And there s also a question about what is the role of AFSI. It s a very nebulous, leaderless kind of group. Not all of the members are G8, so there s not a clear way to provide accountability for what AFISI s doing and ensure that it follows up on the meetings and the commitments that are made in the meetings. CFS wants to take care of that problem. CFS is the Committee on Food Security, which is FAO provides a secretariat for the CFS. It was revised last year, reinvigorated, I would say, and now has a new mandate. It s really a two-phase reform process, and it s the first phase was to open the membership up to a much broader range of stakeholders so that it now includes the private sector as well as NGOs in civil society and member governments, FAO member governments. That s a good thing in terms of providing transparency, providing a forum for all countries to come together and have a say in the food security the global food security debate. It may prove to be problematic in terms of Page 6 of 16

7 governance and producing actual outcomes. But the G8 leaders have and others, have consistently called for a very inclusive and open process to allow all stakeholders a voice in addressing the issue of food security. And so the CFS has the potential fill that need. One of the second parts of the reform process which hasn t been fully agreed to yet is a mapping exercise. And mapping is actually a misnomer. It s more like a taking inventory process that they re considering. And it would be a follow-up to or an expansion of what AFSI is doing. AFSI, as I said, has collected information on commitments by donor countries, aggregate commitments by donor countries, and now is starting to collect information on disbursements at the country level. What the CFS mapping proposes to do is gather information on the strategies, investment plans, framework documents, all of the background information at the country level, look at the investment flows by donors, the investment plans by the countries, and then also start gathering information on the accountability process and monitoring the outcomes and the impact analysis. That s a very ambitious scope to do this globally, to collect all that information in one place, make it available to everyone. There s no question it would provide a lot of transparency and accountability. There are questions about the cost. There are questions about whether countries are really prepared to commit to that level of accountability. And not just the donor countries. A number of the developing countries are a little concerned about this. Some don t want to have that level of transparency on their own budget commitments. So it s very much a work in progress. I think as an interim step what will probably happen is that somewhere between AFSI and CFS, there will be a sincere effort to try and collect more information on disbursements at the country level. And the CAADP process has a built-in accountability framework that s still in the process of development, but will provide a lot of information about impact analysis and accountability. So I think there will be an effort to really move forward in this area of accountability, and it s critically important because it goes to the credibility of our efforts and the efforts of the partner countries. If we can t show credibility, then ultimately, the political support for spending the money in this way starts erode, and we really don t want to see that happen. And then, finally, the third element is strategic coordination. Now this one is probably the squishiest of the three. Everybody likes to talk about strategic coordination, but it s really kind of hard to define what it is and what we re Page 7 of 16

8 getting out of it. To start with, early in the food price crisis, the UN established a high-level taskforce which is currently led by David Nabaro, which brings together 22 UN organizations, plus the World Bank and a few others, to coordinate their actions on food security, the response to food security. And they produced a document called The Comprehensive Framework for Action, which when you boil it down basically says we should follow a two-track approach to food security. And these people also have different definitions of what the two tracks are. But in their case, the two tracks are relate to time. One is provide emergency assistance, and to is to provide long-term development assistance. That framework the Comprehensive Framework for Action is in the process of being updated now. In fact, there s a meeting next week to go over a revised draft of it and get input from stakeholders. I don t think it s actually going to change that much. I don t think the perhaps, the assessment of the current situation will change, but I don t think the response is changing that much. But that s one element of strategic coordination, but it involves getting the UN agencies together. Now it s hard to say what the what s really come out of that, other than a document. Nabaro and his handful of people that actually work day to day on this have gone around to a large number of countries to kind of do their own assessments of the food security situation and have been sharing that information. But I d say one of the great values of that group so far has been simply to have a single entry point for people to engage the UN system and the global food security debate. And so from that perspective, I think it has been useful. It will continue. But it s a little difficult to say how it s going to continue to fit into the whole coordination exercise. And then there s the Committee on World Food Security. I mentioned that one of their next steps is mapping. The other part of the two-phase reform process is to decide whether CFS should establish a global strategy for food security. Now one could argue that the Comprehensive Framework for Action is a global strategy for food security, but CFS but many would probably argue, Well, yes. But it was developed by the UN without stakeholder input and so it s the UN s strategy. So we need one that involves all stakeholders. The US is a little leery of going in this direction with the CFS. We re concerned that it would come out a little bit like some previous efforts to take a comprehensive view of agricultural and how agricultural should be coordinated and governed globally. There s a question of whether we really need at a global Page 8 of 16

9 level that level of governance, that level of oversight of what s being done. And, again, this goes back to the mapping exercise. You can collect all that information in one place, or try to, but then what do you do with it? And I think the governance issue is a serious one that s going to have to be addressed. But the CFS traditionally has been a very ineffective group. They re trying very hard to be more responsible, more effective, more inclusive. But I think there are real questions about whether there s a capability there to really provide any type of global coordination. Now what they can do is collect best practices, disseminate information, provide a forum for policy discussions. They re going to have a high-level panel of experts that can provide some scientific and technical advice to member countries. But whether it can take the next step and go to actual recommending decisions and strategic frameworks and policy guidance is a real open question at this point. So that s kind of, in broad strokes, what I ve been able to distill out of all of our various efforts at global coordination. And I guess what I would like to do is really just ask for some of your input at this point. One, do you think global coordination is worthwhile at any of these levels, at the global level, at the national level, at the regional level, involving other stakeholder? There s no question that a lot of times, it s easier to just go out and do things on your own. The reality is, we more and more don t have the freedom to do that. Then the follow-up question would be, well if it s not if it is more trouble than it s worth, then what s the alternative? Can we go out and do things on our own? Are there other functional approaches besides the three I ve outlined that you could see that we d get out of our efforts to coordinate multilaterally? Are there other things we should be looking for? Are there other objectives we should be trying to achieve with our multilateral coordination? And I guess, finally, how do we judge if we re being effective? What kind of benchmarks should we be looking for in terms of our efforts to coordinate multilaterally? So with that, I ll open it up to questions and comments. Female: If you could just state your name when you ask your question. Audience: Hi. I m Jerry Wolgen. I work in the Africa Bureau, and I spent a number of years dealing with these coordination multilateral coordination issues. And I have Page 9 of 16

10 just a few comments, one of which is positive, most of which are not. First, there s a lot of this stuff it seems to me is a lot of activity with no outcome. I mean, there s a lot of people who are trying to maintain or trying to find a place for themselves. And I think your comments were mostly realistic about the difficulties of doing this and the usefulness of it. Second, I think that most of the coordination needs to be done at the country level, and that s where you ll get the biggest bang. And the idea of global coordination only probably has some positive benefit to the extent you re talking about global public goods. But broader strategic focus doesn t make much sense. It has to be done at the country level. My third comment is that the whole idea of accountability is in many ways a waste of time. The G8 donors made all kinds of commitments in It and they were going to finish by It s now They haven t lived up to their commitments. And there s no accountability for it. It s not that people don t know. It s just that they said they were going to do it and they re not going to do it. And my guess is that their commitment at La Quilla are going to have the same impact the same effect. If you look around at all the problems countries are having with their budgets, governments, aren t going to come up with what they promised. They promised that because they were forced to promise it. And then my guess is they won t do it. Now the only positive statement I have about this, and I think it really is positive at the country level. I think it s an important thing, and I don t want to be negative about that. But I think the other area to look to for is with the donors that we re not talking about. And it s interesting that Korea is contributing to this trust fund and they re now interested in providing more foreign assistance. I think it s interesting that China, particularly, is a player. We haven t captured we haven t figured out to work with them, but they re a major player in many of these areas, and particularly in Africa. It s interesting that there are a number of foundations, new foundations, including our new friend, the Gates Foundation, that are providing all kinds of assistance, particularly in agricultural. So I think one of the things that this international system needs to do is to try to figure out how to capture the players who aren t normally part of it, because those are the ones that are have more sources of new money, but they re also ones that tend not to be part of the system. So I think anything we can do to try to encourage them to be more of a player in this arena would be useful. Gates is also a contributor this multi-donor trust fund. So mostly negative, but a little bit positive. Page 10 of 16

11 David Hegwood: All right. Do we have any questions from online yet? Female: No. David Hegwood: Okay. Audience: This is Josette from the Office of Agriculture. Maybe I think the point that you raised and that Jerry has highlighted about, sort of these are high-transaction costs. What do you get for it, is always an important one, and some of these institutions do have a tendency to try to justify their existence by generating things. But I do the one divergent opinion I have is that I do think there is a need at a global level to keep food security high on the political agenda, and t tin the absence of multilateral forum and institutions, that becomes difficult. And I think we do have still a very risk very significant risk that food security is not going to stay on the top priorities for very long, the way HIV AIDS somehow has managed to do so. So I for me, one of the real goals is to think about it from a very political context, to keep the resource flows elevated and not go back to where they were. So I think there s a critical David Hegwood: So you see those two as connected, the political Audience: I do. David Hegwood: attention and resource flows. Yeah. Audience: I do, yeah. I mean, they re obviously not 100 percent correlated, as we re learning from the La Quilla pledges, obviously, but you re not going you re probably not going to be getting the resource commitments even at the country level if this isn t considered a political priority for the top levels of governments. Page 11 of 16

12 David Hegwood: Yes, back there. Audience: I m Judy Payne from USAid s ICT team, Information and Communications Technologies, and I work on ICT for the food security. I am a student of AG, so I can learn from you. And I hear so much about the CAADP process and know roughly what it does, but not very well. Does anybody have examples of where it s having great benefits? I hear about its burdens and processes. And, also, where the benefits are for regional coordination among countries and among donors that might have some promise, not global coordination, but at least on a regional basis. David Hegwood: Is there somebody from the Africa bureau that wants to respond to that? If no, I ll say go ahead. Audience: I m not from Africa bureau, but [Laughs] I can give it a shot. First, I am glad Josette came in and kind of expressed what I was thinking about Jerry s comment. I think we re having the kind of discussion in country today because we the process start at a global level. I think we need to give credit to AID, particularly US government generally for taking the leadership and bringing about that kind of discussion to take place, let what we have today in various countries, regarding particularly CAADP. Coming back to Chris, and, yes, you hear a lot of negative feedback about the slow nature of the CAADP process. To some extent there is a good justifiable reason why that criticism is out there. But the truth is that we re again having the kind of discussion we have today, have put together several very strong institutions for regional collaboration and coordination in place because we have gone through this process over the last five years because the political wheel there and the G8 process brought that created the forum for people to come together and make those critical decisions why we are where we are. I don t know what kind of specific example that you are requesting, but definitely we have very strong platforms and institutions that are moving the whole idea of having national programs that brings both donors and country participants and players together to start thinking about having a comprehensive investment plan in many of these countries. Page 12 of 16

13 Audience: Can I just just add a couple things. One is I just want to say I agree with what Josette said. I think it s really important from a political perspective to continue the emphasis on food security after years and years of neglect. The CAADP process, I think the process is the product. And it is the process of the African governments and the African stakeholders taking control of what they see as what they want to do, and commitment of those governments to make agricultural an important part of their moving forward. So just the I mean, just the their commitment to increase their spending on agricultural, let s hope it s effective spending. It s an important movement forward, and that s part of the process. And I ve been looking at number of these investment plans that are being developed, and they have a long way to go. But their overall strategy, their overall approach is much more programmatic, much more rational, much more market-sensitive, than anything that we ve seen before. And I think the products that are going to come out of that are going to have many opportunities for investments to move forward. And I think we don t yet have, except we have one government that s going through the process and presumably is investment-ready, and that s Ruanda. There s a lot yet to be done. But I think the process itself is what s the important thing and I think at the end of the day in a couple of years, we ll have a number of very good African investment plans that can be funded. David Hegwood: in the back. Audience: Yeah, Barbara Best. I m with USAid EGAT Natural Resources Management office. Just to follow up, certainly multilateral engagements are important, and I always like to look at it in terms of the sandwich approach. Yes, we need it at the country level, but oftentimes you need that external pressure either through regional commitments or through multilateral processes to really engage the government, as well as bottom-up approaches to put pressure on them to change. In terms of the multilateral or the external forces, what I have not heard anybody talk about is the World Trade Organization. If we re really serious about food security, we have to look at some of the trade policies and reforming Page 13 of 16

14 those. Oftentimes, there are very perverse subsidies involved, and so I d like to have comments about how do we work with that. And the other big factor here is and it s really never addressed is the whole population growth issue. David Hegwood: Well, let me just say a word because this has come up in several contexts, and maybe it s something I didn t really point out. But I think one of the other perhaps coming under transparency and accountability is there s a role for providing standards, guidelines, and I think that s part of what s come out of the CAADP process. Yes, it s a process, but I think part of the value of the process is to validate practices. Now the WTO, similarly does that, but through a rules-based approach. I think many of the countries we re talking about aren t quite ready for the rules-based approach yet. For the most part, they re exempt from most of the rules when it comes to agricultural. So what they need instead, and one of the things we've been focused on, is how do you define an enabling policy environment for those countries? So provide them guidelines for the policies, rather than providing rules for the policies. Once they start to get the right policies in place, then hopefully they ll be better able to comply with the rules-based framework. But I think there s a lot of work that needs to be done before we get to that point to help them get the policies in place. Now there are certain policies we d probably say are total nonstarters, like exports bands. But, frankly, export bands aren t necessarily prohibited by the WTO. So there s a whole spectrum of activities there from rules to guidelines, standards, etcetera, that within which we can work. And a lot of those, to my knowledge, most of those have to be developed multilaterally. Female: I have a question from the Webinar. This is from Glenn Rogers, here at USAid. Would you expand on the potential of EU/US collaboration going forward to drive multilateral dimensions? What are the most promising areas of shared interests? David Hegwood: Well, topical question. There is a recently announced US/EU development dialogue that the administrator launched a couple a weeks ago, and food Page 14 of 16

15 security is one of the three priority items that will be taken up in that dialogue. Primarily, the way we re approaching food security in the US/EU dialogue is to reinforce and further enhance what we re already doing primarily at the country level by encouraging grater collaboration between the US and EU, for example, in the country-led processes, great collaboration in coordinating for the, for example, the CAADP trust fund. So in a way, it s largely about doing what we re already doing, but doing it in a more collaborative and hopefully more effective manner by working more closely together. There s also a global dimension on the research side where we re trying to, again work within existing frameworks of the CGIR reform to make sure that we re moving in the same direction and, where possible, pursuing the same priorities. So we ve been approached by other countries for similar types of bilateral collaborative activities. And I guess the real question is to what extent should we be using those bilateral initiatives to launch new efforts versus using them to further enhance what we re already doing? And I think that s still an open question. Phil? Audience: Thanks, David. This is a very informative presentation. I have two comments. The shorter one I think goes to Judy s question about compacts and regional compacts. I believe there is one regional CAADP compact. That s when West Africa, the ECOWAS compact, which was signed in November. I m not as wellread as I might be on it, but I know it concerns trade facilitation, and I believe sharing agricultural research and development efforts. My other comment concerns a GAO report on the US government s efforts to achieve to work within a global food security effort. And it raises it s skeptical about the country-led processes. And its point is that there will be many instances where a partner country s policies and priories diverge will diverge from those of the US. And discussing this was one of our bilateral missions, and it happens to be in Africa. The mission director raised I thought an excellent point was one way to moderate unsound policies and practices to improve transparency and inject some element of peer review is to multilateralize the discussions through CAADP or through other donor coordinating Page 15 of 16

16 groups, donor sector working groups, what have you. And I thought that was a good response for the GAO to hear. David Hegwood: Well, I think that is an important point. And we have to be realistic. If we engage multilaterally, we re not always going to get our way. I mean, that s part of the process is you want to bring others around to a consensus based on your views, but it doesn t always work out that way. So it s yes, sometimes it s easier to go it alone and just determine where we want to invest, and do it and not worry about that kind of partnership. But it seems that the experience we ve had tells us that that s not necessarily the most effective way, either. So point taken. Yeah. Mark, did you have a question? Okay. Female: back? David Hegwood: No? Female: Any more questions? Just to wrap up. [Laughs] With that, I d like to thank you, David, for helping us shift a bit of the thinking within the agency to not just what we do in a very operational sense, but actually how we engage in what is this administration s really firm commitment to being part of a global effort, and both the pros and cons associated with that. So thank you for that. And thanks, everyone, for participating. I think our next seminar will be in June, so stayed tune. And, actually, I think I m on the agenda to talk about either research or some other aspect of the food security initiative. So we ll be in touch with respect to that. Thanks, everyone. [Applause] [End of Audio] Page 16 of 16