It is essential for success that the GCARD is seen as truly representative of all regions and all perspectives on agricultural research for development. We would like to encourage you to help ensure a fair representation of 40 individuals from your region, drawn up as balanced numbers from research (national, regional and international), farmers, civil society organizations, private sector, policy makers and donors.

It is important that we collectively work to ensure an adequate geographical representation from the regions, and also have a balance in terms of gender and in terms of representative stakeholders who participate.

Please ask potential pre-registrants from your region to visit http://www.gcardpreregistration.com as soon as possible to declare their interest in representing their region and stakeholder group for the GCARD Conference 2010 in Montpellier in France.

Please now immediately spread the message through your networks, contacting all concerned before the coming holiday season, to allow us to have a good idea of numbers and representation of stakeholders from responses received by
10th January.

We will monitor those pre-registering so we can ensure that we can help guide you on the balance from each stakeholder group and at the global level have a representative balance across regions.

Once this is achieved we will need to all move swiftly to full registration, accommodation and travel bookings by the end of January.

Please do not hesitate to if we can be of further help or to clarify anything.