After internal consultations in FAO as well as consultations of the steering committee members, the decision goes to holding the Land and Water Days in two stages:

Stage 1: the policy dialogues will be merged to the ICARDA international Conference, An effort should be made to address common policy themes of interest to the steering committee members. The pre-conference can be either kept or disregarded in the format of poster sessions, thematic cafes to discuss specific policy issues raised from evidence based challenges , which is still feasible at this stage.

Stage 2: 16-19 September: to hold a Land and Water Days in a country of the region with a knowledge sharing fair , training sessions and a market place with a technical address on how to cope with water scarcity at the project level, as a result of the FAO regional water scarcity initiative