Agriculture today is confronted with a complex and rapidly evolving agenda. The original task was challenging enough: to ensure that all had access to enough food of sufficient quality to lead healthy and productive lives, even as the world’s population was rising rapidly. Two additional tasks have recently complicated matters, greatly raising the stakes for human kind: following a belated awareness that poverty is the underlying constraint limiting access to food, the first task is to harness agriculture to the challenge of eradicating poverty; the second, which reflects the now universal desire to use the world’s natural capital more responsibly, is to find ways of developing agriculture sustainably, conserving biodiversity, soils, water and other resources so that future generations may enjoy their use. In the light of this more challenging agenda, it is clear that holistic agricultural research, taking multiple objectives and perspectives into account, has an important role to play. This is research that can only be carried out by representatives of all the different groups that have a stake in its outcome. We call such an approach agricultural research for development (ARD).
One of the roles of the Global Forum on Agricultural Research (GFAR) is to provide a forum for the identification of research priorities and opportunities for the various stakeholder groups involved in ARD to form the necessary alliances and partnerships to meet their priorities. In its first Annual Report, GFAR describes some of the activities carried out by its stakeholder institutions, all working towards common goals.
FAO, as one of the facilitating agencies for GFAR, houses the GFAR Secretariat. It also acts in many other ways to nurture GFAR’s vision and help it pursue its mission. A number of FAO units, services, programmes and divisions, both at headquarters and in the field, collaborate with GFAR stakeholders across the globe to implement many of the activities described in this report. I congratulate the GFAR Secretariat and member institutions on these collaborative efforts. And I hope that this report marks only the beginning of what will become a long tradition of sharing the activities and accomplishments of GFAR with a broader audience, as it continues to address its goals of improving food security, eradicating poverty and making agriculture more sustainable through ARD.
Jacques
Diouf
Director-General
Food and Agriculture Organization of the
United Nations
