Professor Alain Rival is the Resident Director for SouthEast Asia Island Countries and the Coordinator for Oil Palm Research at Cirad, the French Centre for International Cooperation in Agricultural Research for Development. Pr Alain RIVAL is an agronomist by training and a plant molecular physiologist; he received his PhD in Plant Biotechnology from the University of Montpellier in 1988 then he spent the first years of his career (1985-1995) running collaborative plant biotechnology programmes overseas (Ivory Coast, Indonesia, Malaysia, Costa Rica). Dr RIVAL qualified for the Habilitation of Research Director in Life Sciences in 1997 from the University of Paris and he is a Qualified Professor in Biology and Physiology since 2002. Dr Rival spent two years as a Marie Curie International Fellow at CSIRO Plant Industry in Canberra, Australia (July 2004-2006), within the framework of a European Commission-funded project in plant epigenetics called EPIDEV. Alain RIVAL is based in Jakarta, Indonesia since September 2014, coordinating Cirad collaborative research programs and partnership in the Region. Invited Professor at University Putra Malaysia, Kula Lumpur in 2015-16, Alain RIVAL is the author and co-author of more than 80 research articles and book chapters. Alain co-authored the book “La Palme des Controverses” with Patrice Levang in 2013 (Quae Publisher) and he was the scientific editor of the recent book “Achieving sustainable cultivation of oil palm” ( Burleigh Dodds Science Publishing)