Read a summary of the German speech and question&answer session during the introductory session and find out why researchers are trendsetters Minister Dirk Niebel welcoming around 400 participants of the Tropentag 2013 At mid day, all activities came to a stand still for the speech of the Federal Minister for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) in Germany, Dirk Niebel. Five days before the parliamentary election, he still took around one hour to talk to the audience and also answer their questions. The minister had to give his speech in German, due to the consensus that official representatives should use their national language. Despite this, the speech was also made available in English. With regard to the scientific audience, the liberal politician declares them as being ‘instrumental’ in answering the continuously arising challenges as they identify “trends, ask questions and develop strategies”. In this context, he sees it as the central objective of the conference to address the question of how agricultural producers are responding to the dramatic shift in urban-rural patterns. The ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development and its engagement in official development cooperation cannot achieve food security, which is back on the international agenda, without the help of the scientific public. Among mentioning other aspects where the ministry spends its money on, the minister highlights the financial support of the CGIARs and the new projects which aims at linking agricultural research to the development projects undertaken by the ministry. When closing his speech, he emphasizes the necessity of a cooperation between the researching and the policy designing bodies as well as among the scientists which is the aim of the upcoming conference. After his speech, it was at first the turn of Hohenheim university professors to ask questions. Professor Birner took the chance to ask the minister about the ways the BMZ wants to support small scale farmers. Professor Asch was interested in the minister’s opinion on how researcher’s should put their strategic aims to secure the rural and urban food and energy. As concrete fields of research, Mr. Niebel suggested to solve the problem of increasing completion on arable land for food and energy, for example by further developing so-called ‘energy plants of the second generation’. The question of Professor Ahlheim was related to a specific case of his scientific work abroad: he described the case where a project tried to introduce environmental payment schemes to support reforestation in China, but even though was taken up positively in the beginning, it failed in the end due to administrative structures in the background that had not been known before. Niebel finished his answer with the statement that in some cases, research and development projects are powerless as long as local elites are not willing to improve the situation of their own people. When answering a few more questions of other professors, students and journalists, the minister showed his abilities to smoothly answer questions, as even though they always sounded to be a repetition of some prewritten and recited statement. Only when the student from China, Xi Zhao asked about her chances of finding a job after graduating from a German university, she caused amusement among the audience as she caught the minister off guard with her question.