The concept of launching ¿Global Partnership Programmes¿ (GPPs) resulted from the acknowledgement that although the world is faced with an increasingly complex challenge of feeding its growing population, scientific and technological progress is generating the knowledge to make it possible to meet this challenge while assuring an equitable and sustainable development. The capacity to respond successfully to this situation will have an impact on the well being of all societies, making it a global issue.

The Near East and North Africa Region is food deficit and for many years, it has been the largest net food importer among developing countries. As some 60% or more of the population of the region live in the rural areas and depend on agriculture for their livelihood, the decreasing agricultural production is therefore not only affecting food security in general but also hampering poverty alleviation efforts..

Coordinators of Facilitation Units (FUs), together at GFAR Steering Committee Meeting in Manila, decided to set up a Plan of Action to better coordinate activities between them.
The development of different units is various as well as strategies for disseminating information about different activities.
Because FUs are launched under the umbrella of GFAR, one of GFAR¿s task is to help FUs in developing their strategies and in disseminating their information

Discussion paper on the involvement of the Private Sector in GFAR

This paper is a compilation of responses sent by individuals from NGOs ¿ also beyond the members of the NGOC. They have not yet been fed back to the NGOs to create a consensus; they are being circulated to NGOs at the same time as being sent to the CDMT

Many people and organisations concerned with agricultural research and development are
still unaware of the creation of a Global Forum on Agricultural Research (GFAR), or have
only a vague idea what it might be. In this article, a member of a German-based
nongovernmental organisation (NGO) that promotes ecologically-oriented agriculture
examines the process of building the GFAR and describes the response of NGOs. The
GFAR initiative is an attempt to open up agricultural research to a wider group of

When the PELUM Board tasked me to coordinate the Small Farmer Convergence (SFC) process in April 2002, I felt a big load lending on my shoulders. For, even though most of the PELUM member countries had already begun the sensitisation and agenda setting process, we had no resources then, nor did we have the farmer issues and concerns in consolidated form. There was too little time to raise the resources and to make the necessary preparations. But today, as I write this foreword in Johannesburg, I realise that there was indeed enough time for the SFC got to do what we set out to do.