Tables in R markdown

I would like to create a manual table in R markdown, I am aiming to have the final output as follow:

I tried the following code but it did not work:

Authority   | Responsibility                 | Period
:-----      | :----                          | :-----
 MOIWR      |           Text 1               | 2010
   ^^       |           Text 2               | 2011 
   ^^       |           Text 3               | 2012  
   IWC      |           Text 4               | 2013 
   SGB      |           Text 5               | |

could you please help me to figure out how to do that !

Pandoc, the converter used in R Markdown, does not yet support Markdown tables with cells spanning multiple rows and/or columns. A good workaround is to write the table in HTML and to parse it in a Lua filter.

The following filter detects HTML tables and makes sure they can be converted to different output formats:

function RawBlock (raw)
  if raw.format:match 'html' and raw.text:match '^%s*%<table' then
    return pandoc.read(raw.text, 'html').blocks
  end
end

Use the filter like this:

---
output:
  html_document:
    pandoc_args:
      - '--lua-filter=html-table.lua'
---

``` {=html}
<table>
  <tr>
    <td>column 1</td>
    <td>column 2</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td colspan="2">column 1 and 2</td>
  </tr>
</table>
```