Dear Nancy, From our perspective certainly yes. Why it will help our work at IICA: A. CGIAR can serve as an example to other research institute about the importance of sharing information. Some of them are not willing to provide access to their research outputs and knoledge. B. SIDALC service in Latin America and the Caribbean (www.sidalc.net) looks exactly for those type of partners, facilitating their full text information to a large community of users. C. CGVirtual Library is a great step and it is one of the product we like to promote during our working meetings with national networks and communities around the hemisphere. D. CGIAR contents will add value to the more than 25000 full text materials inside SIDALC, 225 Latin America data bases and information services for the benefit of the region in terms of research, trade, innovation and education.

Hello from Latin America. My name is Federico Sancho from IICA, headquarters in Costa Rica. Innovation for us has been the improvement of individual agricultural library services to collaborative national and regional networks. 141 institutions already has move forward into an open initiative of sharing agricultural content out of their library and full text collection. This service operating since 1999 in the region is called SIDALC. You can visit it at www.sidalc.net

It´s great to share experiences with you. Four major things need to be address in terms of accesability of farmers: - Their livehoods and conditions. - Their information needs, usually limited to market, technology and weather. (Out of the experience we have in Latin America) - Their language or way of understanding it. - The means to access it: ICT, extension, local chats, etc. Infraestructure as Miguel says usually is not the best. Radio al Content which has to be timelly and of quality. Well presented and in a language that can be understood by farmers. Extension services are an important bridge between information producers and end-users. Unfortunatelly their structures has been decaying since two decades. Even in some countries those services has shut down or are under private sector hands. ICT, comes as a solution, but a lot needs to be done in a region where the best scenario is between 15 or 20% of the population have access to the internet. We need to understand information as a "perishable good" that work as a chain: We have imputs to produce proper information, we have information producers, we have information transformers (some called it intelligence), we have information distributors and we have information users. All of that inside a social context and with a set of tools or means to use. Having a missing piece in any part of that chain will not give us a complete frame work. I hope inside our discussion we have that broad approach and discuss around each of those pieces? All the best, Federico Sancho Inter-American Institute for Cooperation in Agriculture IICA