The Joint Africa-EU Strategy provides a long-term vision for a strategic partnership between Africa and the European Union. Many countries in Africa are confronting particular challenges in meeting the targets of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) by 2015, and will require a broad range of strengthened efforts to meet those targets. Such efforts must include effective action to tackle the shortfalls in policy, predictable financing, and data collection and implementation capacities. Children, gender, HIV/AIDS and the environment will be addressed as cross-cutting priorities.

To implement the commitments made in the Joint Strategy, the EU and Africa will address and advance all identified objectives on all the strategic priorities, with a wider view of supporting African countries in their efforts to attain all Millennium Development Goals by the year 2015. The African and European Leaders agreed in Lisbon to implement these selected priority actions in the context of specific "Africa-EU Partnerships'" and "Priority Actions" on subjects of common interest, articulated in an Action Plan. The Plan includes a Priority Action on "Accelerate the achievement of the Food Security Targets of the MDGs". The objective is to make substantial progress towards achieving the Millennium Development Objective of halving the proportion of people who suffer from hunger and malnutrition by the year 2015 in all African countries. Expected outcomes include issues such as better access to food, increased agricultural growth rates, improved agricultural productivity and reduced rural poverty, improved governance in the agricultural sectors, enhanced intra-Africa trade in agriculture, reduced malnutrition, reduced maternal and child mortality, improved food-security early warning systems, wider application of safety-net / social transfer systems, reduced vulnerability in food-insecure communities.

Agricultural research is targeted as a key area for collaboration, to strengthen institutional cooperation and coordination between national agricultural research systems (NARS) and regional and international research programmes, notably with EU research institutes, in the framework of the new partnership on agriculture between the EU and Africa.

In this context the European Commission organised a workshop in collaboration with the European and the African Fora (EFARD & FARA), through the Platform for the African European Partnership on Agricultural Research for Development (PAEPARD), with the collaboration of CTA. The workshop was held in Brussels in April 2008, was attended by experts from the two continents, and helped in identifying priorities for the programming of the European Commission instruments targeting agricultural research for development: the Framework Programme on Research and Technology (FP7), and Food Security Thematic Programme (FSTP).