Special Edition Special Edition Special Edition Special Edition
August 2003
Keynote Addresses
Side Events
- CGIAR Regional Priority-setting Report
- Towards a Global Agenda for ICM
- International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources / Global Conservation Trust
Sub-plenary Session on GPPs
- Rural Knowledge
Systems & Innovation Processes - Agrobased SMEs & Markets
- Agriculture–Livestock Integration
- Organizational Partnerships for Agricultural Research
- Innovative Policy Directions & Approaches for Sustainable Agricultural Development
Stakeholder Consultations
GFAR 2003 Conference Evaluation
List of Acronyms 
Side Events
Towards a Global Agenda for ICM
During the GFAR conference three parallel side events took place at the lunch breaks, and provided an opportunity for stakeholders to share information, knowledge and experiences in ARD.
During this side event organized by the GFAR Secretariat, several short presentations were made on ongoing successful ICM initiatives at different levels. All of the presentations highlighted the value of stakeholder involvement and the subsequent impact on these stakeholders and other end users. Special attention was paid to lessons learned from current partnerships among ICM practitioners. Recommendations for future partnership development strategies were made with the overall goal of identifying elements of a future global agenda for ICM.
Overview of Regional Initiatives
Henning Knipschild presented the EARD-Infosys+ experience in managing the RAIS for Europe, and highlighted the recent development of an extranet tool (PHProjekt) designed to improve information sharing within and amongst various stakeholders in Europe.
Following that, Ahmed Rafea presented the information strategy for the WANA region and some of the key outputs of the AARINENA-RAIS workshop held in Cairo at the end of February 2003, under the umbrella of the GLOBAL.RAIS project, led by the GFAR Secretariat. A special emphasis was put on the presentation of the Management Information System (MIS) as an integrated tool enabling the management of information on institutions, experts and ongoing activities. He drew attention to the expected gateway function and the electronic forum of discussion leading to a Question and Answer (Q&A) function. Special mention was made of the AARINENA website managed by Taraneh Ebrahimi in Iran.
This was followed by Arman Manukyan who focused his presentation on the new regional website for the Caucasus region, Agroweb Caucasus. This website is consistently integrated with the Agroweb portal already functioning for Eastern Europe led by FAO/SEUR from Budapest. The scaling-up of this process to Central Asia was clearly underlined.
And finally, Enrique Alarcón presented the main achievements of INFOTEC, the RAIS of FORAGRO. The role of portal already played by INFOTEC for the various regional programs (called PROCIs) was clearly demonstrated as well as specific contents of the website such as the < span class="CurrentTextI">market place for available technologies.
Overview of Regional Initiatives
Irene Onyantcha, from FAO Headquarters in Rome, presented the healthy portfolio of the activities led by FAO in ICM. Capacity-building activities, a resource kit for the management of electronic documents and the AGORA program - an electronic access to published journals - were reviewed, but a special emphasis was put on the new AGRIS strategy.
Fulvia Bonaiuti presented the GLOBAL.RAIS project led by the GFAR Secretariat and funded by the European Commission. The key principles of this project such as the bottom-up and decentralized approaches were highlighted. The main achievement will be the building-up of a global agenda in ICM for ARD through a set of five regional workshops and an inter-regional workshop expected to be held in January 2004.
Other Successful Initiatives in ICM
Marc Bernard from ZADI presented the RUN project as a successful ICT tool that farmers could use to solve concrete problems. He described the website of e-journals, the Q&A service provided through this platform and the manner in which the demand from farmers is supported rather than the offer by service providers. Further developments were made on SMS or WAP platforms, very similar to services already available, for instance in Senegal.
Ajit Maru from ISNAR presented the iNARS e-discussion as a platform for sharing information and experiences within a worldwide community of ICM professionals. The recent achievements were presented, focusing on the role of ICT and the specific requirements to use ICT. This list of discussion was clearly perceived as a very useful tool for all the information and communication managers in ARD.
General Discussion
After the presentations participants highlighted some concerns and made the following recommendations: firstly the need to raise awareness of the various initiatives and maximize the opportunities they offer in order to benefit from economies of scale and the resulting synergies, secondly the need to strengthen RAIS through the sharing of experiences at the intra- and inter-regional levels, and thirdly the need to define a global agenda for ICM, through a bottom-up approach, by connecting activities and stakeholders.
Finally, a proposal was endorsed to continue with this discussion under the umbrella of iNARS.
Print version
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